Donate Your Computer

Many of us use our computer during the day and evening. Some even use it during the night. But there’s hardly anyone who has their computer on 24 hours a day. Most of us switch the computer off after we’ve finished with it and put it on again when we want to do something else. This switching on and off all the time isn’t good for a computer. If you think that you may be using it later in the day it is much better to leave it switched on. There are quite a number of people who leave their computer on all day, just putting it off at night. That is a good idea.

But when your computer is lying idle during the day it could be doing vital research to help find cures for such things as cancer and HIV. This research needs massive computing power and the cost of such power is enormous and unlikely to be forthcoming. So a number of years ago an idea was put forward to harness the power of domestic PCs. Volunteers would be asked to donate their PCs idle cpu time to help do the enormous number of complicated calculations needed to further the development of new drugs to bring a cure for these diseases. Hense the advent of a number of agencies who bring together this voluntry computing power, supply the computers with calculation “jobs” and send the results back to the researchers. Another term used for describing these calculations is “folding”.

If you decide to donate your computers idle cpu time, all you need to do is register with one of the organisations and download a small piece of software into your computer. Once this software has been installed and setup (an easy job) then the process of doing the “folding” work will start and anytime your computer isn’t being used by you, it will be “crunching” the jobs that are sent automatically to your computer via the Internet connection, and when the job is done, the results are automatically sent back. Another job will be waiting to continue the process. If during any processing you switch off your computer, when you next switch it on, the process will continue from where it left off. Any work you do on your computer has priority, hence you’ll see no slowdown on your programs.

We have been doing this with our four PCs for quite a long time and it is a joy to think that we are able to help in a small way to bring about a cure for these diseases by donating our unused computer power.

Most of the groups that do this work have user forums to help with any problem you might encounter and also bring the voluteer comunity closer together. Go and take a look at the four most popular of these agencies where you can learn much more.

We are now ‘crunching’ for World Community Grid (WCG). Within this group, a number of teams have been formed to bring a little competitiveness into things. The Teddies Team is the one that we belong to and it is good to be in contact with great people who are all interested in using their PCs to help research. They are always willing to help anyone who wants advice on getting started and are always ready to chat on many subjects.