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Distributed Computing

DPic [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, January 4, 2007
17 years ago2,899 views

I thought I'd share this cool way to help research which uses distributed computing to utilize more CPU power than a supercomputer and it's cheaper too. The two most well known dc projects are SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intellegence) http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and f[put at-character here]h (Folding @ Home) http://folding.stanford.edu/

Distributed computing lets you help scientists by donating the spare CPU on your computer to research on things from HIV/AIDS, climate change, cancer, and evolution. (AIDS may already have a cure http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_3482712)

Kirk Pearson of Sun Microsystems runs a great website about distributed computing which features a very complete directory of all of the projects you can contribute to. http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html

SETI uses Internet-connected computers to search for extra-terrestrial radio signals

f[put at-character here]h simulates protein folding in an effort to better understand how proteins self-assemble or fold

Other notable project include:

http://www.climateprediction.net/ to predict Earth's climate 50 years from now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/ to study global climate warming due to different processes in the 20th century and to predict the transient climate response, the actual climate change expected to occur for various scenarios over the next 80 years.

http://lhcathome.cern.ch/ to design the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator being built by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I've run Prime95 for years and I run Distributed.net's OGR client on and off (my new MacBook just smokes at OGR).

If you have a high end ATI card, you might want to look at running Folding[put at-character here]Home's GPU client, which gets amazing speed.

DPic [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Folding[put at-character here]Home (so I've heard) will take advantage of the Play Station 3's processing power

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