Brother can you Spare a CPU Cycle?

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:56:18 +0000

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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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Brother can you Spare a CPU Cycle?

Chris Pirillo » seti@home

Brother can you Spare a CPU Cycle?