Who the hell knows why, but I was reminded of my old ‘do-a-bit-for-humanity’ thing that I used to maintain at varsity. SETI@HOME. Use your computer to analyse radio waves from the stars in order to find aliens.
For those who don’t know, it worked like this:
- Download a small programme
- The programme downloads a work unit
- Your computer starts spinning away at the work unit in the background
- CPU runs at 100% all the time
- However, SETI runs at a low priority, so if you want to run another programme it doesn’t hog your resources (in theory – things slow down a little anyway)
This is boring.
Ok. The point is this. I’m running BOINC now. BOINC is a distributed computing application (like SETI@HOME), but it schedules the operation of different projects. Thus, I am helping to predict climate-change, cure diseases (I think), play chess960 games, and look for aliens.
What’s that? Oh, still boring.
The Waffle Group 
hehe – I have a spare computer at work which I put to the task of fighting aids last week. http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/ I think that it works through BOINC as well 🙂
Good man, Master Haggis. I’m not too sure about SETI and the Chess games, but the other ones seem good and noble.
You may also want to consider the LHC@home project, since that has a direct local link via UCT’s ALICE group.
Grid computing is becoming more and more the paradigm of choice in the HPC world as bandwidth grows uncontrollably (well, everywhere except SA that is ;).
SETI and the silly chess games are getting less than 14% of my CPU time between them.