Let your home PC crunch numbers for science

[JR-Orion]

Cavers tend to be science minded so I thought you guys would be interested in this-

These programs use the idle time and spare processing power of your computer to study all sorts of different projects. They work on the idea that 1000 regular home PCs working together can be just as powerful as a million dollar supercomputer.

First get the BOINC software here-

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Then select a project that interests you and attach to it.

Here's some popular projects you can sign up for-

Seti@home- analyze radio telescope data looking for possible extraterrestrial signals.

Einstein@home- search through data gathered by LIGO and Arecibo to look for gravitational waves and radio pulsars.

Want something more down to earth?

Rosetta@home- studies protein structure prediction and also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer's disease and other pathologies.

Climateprediction.net- attempts to reduce the uncertainty ranges of various climate models.

World Community Grid- studies a variety of problems in biology, medicine and the environment.

Of course there are others you can choose from-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_di ... g_projects

As you run these projects you earn credits to compare with your friends and encourage some friendly competition. Here's my stats-
http://allprojectstats.com/showuser.php ... r=JR-Orion
1,943,522 credits and growing across four different projects

It's a fun way to do some good for a few bucks a month on your electric bill. :) Though I usually let my PC run 24 hours a day to get max credit.

[JR-Orion]

I just passed 200,000 credits for Climate prediction.net, "the world's largest climate forecasting experiment for the 21st century" -

http://allprojectstats.com/showuser.php ... id=2396683

The work units on for this particular project are bigger than I'm used to seein on SETI and Einstein, that's for sure-

"A 2.8 GHz P4 or Mac G5 machine will take about 3 weeks. We recommend that you do not download the software if you only have your computer switched on for a couple of hours a week."

But my PC is getting the work done at a pretty good pace. 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 overclocked to 3.8GHz.