Here is the link to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC for short. From this website, here is the description of this project.....



Basically, you agree to share your spare computing resources over the Internet with a variety of different research projects around the world. It's pretty cool. You get a list of projects from which to choose, then you can sign up to join a team. You can set all the parameters in terms of what resources they have available, when they can use them and so forth. I signed up for a SETI project based in Perth, Australia and it's been keeping my computer pretty occupied when I'm not using many of it's resources, yet hasn't affected my operations at all. I need to render a video, it renders and SETI waits around for it to complete.

It has always bothered me when I have one of these super powerful machines that spends most of it's time not doing much of anything. This seems like a good way to correct that.

Anyone else involved in BOINC or a similar kind of thing? If so, what project(s) are you signed up for?


Aquilla

I was on the SETI thing until I wiped my computer last time, a couple months ago- this sounds great though- I will save it to favorites when I get home and see how it goes down- thanks for the link!

It really is a cool thing, CR. One thing you can do while it's running is see a graphical representation of the data analysis as it's being performed. Most of the tasks that I've seen thus far are Power Spectral Density calculations using Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) where they break down the waveforms into the spectral (frequency components) and amplitude components (Power). I used to do that stuff all the time when I was doing data analysis from flight testing at Lockheed and ride testing at Disney. I know the kind of computing power that kind of analysis requires and to watch my iMac chew through that data the way it does is astounding! We've sure come a long way in the last few decades.


Aquilla

I've been participating in both the SETI and the protein folding BOINC for a while. It's pretty gratifying to see my CPU go to good use. However, I've been concerned about the gratuitous use of energy so I don't keep my computer on all the time. I agree it's pretty cool seeing those FFTs being churned through.

I got my PS3 on the folding@home project

Way cool! Thanks for bringing our attention to this.

Back in 2001 I did research on grid computing, and this is exactly what I was reading about. Time to donate some bandwidth, cycles and memory.