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 fh (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
fh 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. |
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 FoldingHome's GPU client, which gets amazing speed. |
FoldingHome (so I've heard) will take advantage of the Play Station 3's processing power |