Does anyone here use BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing)? I was a SETI@Home user for a long time, when BOINC came out I switched to it. When you use BOINC your computers idle time is spent helping science out. There are many projects that make use of it: SETI@Home (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) allows your computer to analyze radio data for SETI and help find E.T. (maybe), Rosetta@Home which allows your computer to analyze data and help the team develop new proteins that can fight diseases, and Climateprediction.net which, as you may have guessed, allows your computer to crunch data to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century, those are just some of the examples of projects you can run. For a full list of projects, Click Here. There is a lot of time spent by computers doing nothing, I like projects like these because I can, even in a small way, contribute to advancing knowledge without much effort on my part at all. Anyone already use it? Anyone interested in it? I figure with all the science talk that goes on in this part of the forum, a good number of people should have heard of this already. EDIT: This may have been posted in the wrong forum.
I got a small render farm (3 PCs plus my development PC) that occasionally run rosetta@home. Basically only when I turn it on to do some rendering, and I know I wont be home (or be asleep) when it's done. Instead of the farm just idling, sucking power for no good reason when it's done, it does some good. But no way am I going to let it run 24/7 with no money involved. Computers cost money, and they do degrade over time. Not to mention that they suck a lot of power. Which isn't exactly free either.
I'm currently trying to promote the same thing, but with research into AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy and a number of other motherbuggers.. see my sig
I'm bumping this thread. I use BIONIC on some of my systems occasionally and came across this thread: FAQ and comments about the Higley School District controversy