Volunteer Computing

Help solve the worlds problems by donating your unused CPU cycles to solve complex computational challenges. Known as grid or distributed computing it allows you to share your CPU to perform units of work when your PC is sitting idle. Most machines actually sit idle for a majority of the time. The idea is to take advantage of that idle time and scavenge cpu cycles.

PCs from around the world can be pooled together to process chunks of data independently and send the result back to research institutions.

This concept is not new. Distributed computing projects have been around for over 10 years. The first distributed computing project on the internet was GIMPS which started in 1996. GIMPS sought to discover new large prime numbers and has successfully found at least 10, including the largest on record, 230,402,457-1. Large prime numbers are useful for data encryption.

GIMPS was followed by http://distributed.net, which, starting in 1997. Distributed.net attempts to solve cryptographic challenges. It is sponsored by RSA Labs and CS Communication & Systemes.

The project that put grid computing on the map though didn't come until 1999. SETI@home continues to be one of the most successful grid projects in terms of the amount of CPUs cycles consumed and users involved.

Since then there have been numerous projects to spawn from these early successes. They include:

Rosetta@home — attempts to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases by accurately predicting and designing protein structure and complexes.

FightAIDS@Home Project—tries to identify new candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.

Compute Against Cancer — studies the effects of chemotherapy.

Understanding protein folding and related diseases -
http://folding.stanford.edu/

CommunityTSC — a project of the Rothberg Institute For Childhood Diseases that evaluates drug candidates for Tuberous Sclerosis.

Finding methods to control the spread of malaria -
The http://malariacontrol.net project is an application that makes use of network computing for stochastic modeling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of malaria.

Screensaver Lifesaver — the National Foundation for Cancer Research and Oxford University's United Devices-based, Intel-backed project does "virtual screening" of anticancer drugs by analyzing molecular data with a program called LigandFit.

The The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) has become one of the most used platform for distributed computing projects. BOINC reported recently that "over one million computers have now contributed processing power to BOINC projects.

BIONIC includes client software to enable users to participate in volunteer computing and server software for organizations that want to start such projects. If you wanted, you could setup your own project that tapped into volunteers compute resources. The BIONIC account manager allows you which projects you want to volunteer your machine to.

There are some drawbacks that need to be considered before volunteering your resources. Security is usually the biggest one. Allowing a your PC to run external applications enables access to your computer's resources by these applications. Some the issue that could arise are outlined by BIONIC.

Some other minor considerations include increase electricity usage. Running a CPU at full throttle consumes more electricity than one that is sitting idle.

But for many the positives far outweigh any of the risks outlined above. Being able to contribute to solving some of the worlds most difficult problems is enough of an incentive for most.

Nick
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http://outervillage.com
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