Trouble With Dreams

Put your computer’s CPU to good use when it’s on but you’re not doing anything with it: distributed computing takes one massive task, splits into pieces and has different computers work on them. Then it reassembles the results and is happy. So run one of these projects on your computer and lend a hand to scientists across the world with no effort whatsoever.

1. Climatepredicion.net (and the BBC Climate Change Experiment)

Aims to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate change. You run, and can view, your own simulation of the earth. s’Pretty cool. The BBC gave this a lot of publicity.

From Wikipedia:

This will allow the project to improve understanding of how sensitive the models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and sulphur cycle. In the past, estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands) of model runs. By using participants’ computers, the project will be able to improve understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

2. Folding@Home

A Stanford University project attempting to understand protein folding/misfolding, and related diseases like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and BSE. Apparently idle PS3s are having a great effect on this project!

3. Seti@Home

Everybody knows this one; if you read the newspapers it’s the one ’searching for aliens’. It looks for evidence of possible radio transmissions from extra-terrestrials. So far it has a whole lot of publicity and users (over five million) and no conclusive results, but has found several spots worth investigating further. Just imagine it being your computer that provided the conclusive evidence ;-)

4. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

A real slow one. A Mersenne number is one less than a power of two, M_n = 2ⁿ − 1. Finding five primes in three years has been a lucky streak.

The last Mersenne prime found (in September 2006) was 9,808,358 digits long - the Wikipedia article on it all has a nice summary: 1080 is a rough estimate of the number of atoms that form the entire visible universe. Compare this number, with its 80 digits, to M_32582657, which has over 9.8 million digits.

If you need an incentive, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering $100,000 to whoever finds the first ten million digit prime number!

5. The World Community Grid

This is a collective, rather than a single project. Projects are approved by an advisory board and currently include research into HIV, cancer, muscular dystrophy and genome comparison. Pretty cool if you’ve no particular persuasion for any one project.

And there’s plenty more listed at http://www.distributedcomputing.info/.