Brother can you Spare a CPU Cycle?
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http://live.pirillo.com/ - A community member at large wonders what my opinion is on “E-charity”, such as seti@home. Do I think they are a passing fancy? No… I don’t. I feel this is the wave of the computing future.
seti@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. When you run SETI@home on your computer, it will use part of the computer’s CPU power, disk space, and network bandwidth. You can control how much of your resources are used by SETI@home, and when it uses them.
Another excellent and popular E-charity is Folding@home. Their goal is to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Much like seti@home, Folding@Home is a distributed computing project. People from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to their goals.
Yeah, I think this is an absolutey great theory, and honestly believe it’s the wave of the computing future. Just think, creating a video takes up a serious amount of hardware resources. But as “crunching” becomes more popular, you’ll be able to use any unoccupied computer on your network to do that work for you. This is what crunching is all about… making things work faster, to achieve better results.
What other E-charities are you involved in? Do you believe the work these places are doing is above excellent and the wave of the future? Leave me a comment, video or email and let me know your thoughts!
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6 Comments
ianimate3d
September 27th, 2007
at 9:52pm
Good article, and I too agree that distributed computing is the way of the future. Something interesting to note is Apple has included it’s distributed computing “Xgrid” (www.apple.com/macosx/features/xgrid/) technology with all computers since the release of OS X 10.4 in April 2005. This technology allows you to easily access the distributed power of all Macs on your network. As Chris mentioned regarding video work, VisualHub (www.techspansion.com/visualhub/), a video converter for the Mac also has xgrid support built in to allow it to push encoding work out to other Macs on your network, it’s very cool and can be quite useful in the right environment. I guess the only real downside to Xgrid, is currently there are not very many Xgrid aware apps available.
» Folding@home gets the Pirillo treatment » business|bytes|genes|molecules
September 27th, 2007
at 11:21pm
[...] getting back to the title of the post. Essentially instead of writing a long response to Chris Pirillo’s broadcast on what he calls an “E-charity”, I figured I’d write something here. Chris asks [...]
Deepak SIngh
September 27th, 2007
at 11:29pm
Response (via blog post and video)
LANE ETHERINGTON
September 29th, 2007
at 8:36am
I purchased a new HP computer with windows vista home premium about 5 months ago. I up graded the memory too3 gig and put a game card and added a bigger hard drive. I had several driver problems but was able to get proper drivers with windows help and the software companies. I am most pleased with Vista. I do admit i have held onto my xp computer to run the programs that software companies want you to pay to upgrade to a new version in order to get Vista drivers. (Roxio) for one. Vista has overcome most of the XP problems that I had. You should not upgrade older computers to Vista because it needs at least a gig of ram and 2 for most programs. My computers Rates a 5 On a schale of high 5.9. I haveno problems with games and it has never locked up while running any program. My only regret is that I thought it was a 64 bit os and it is not. it has a amd athlon 64 xduo processor so IO thought it would be a 64 bit os but did not find out until I had it home and running that it wasn’t.
Alan Monroe
October 1st, 2007
at 3:50am
The catch is that not all tasks are equally suitable for distribution. Ones that use lots of source data (gigs of video files) are less practical than ones that use small data (a handful of protein molecules), unless you have a really really fast LAN and fileserver.
Benjamin Rossington
October 1st, 2007
at 10:40am
The amd athlon 64 x duo??
amd athlon 64 x2 is what I think you meant… that cpu is 64bit… your os (vista) is 32 bit.
just trying to help clear that up…