World Community Grid - A call for volunteers

ArndW · Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 11:17 pm

The tagline of the World Community Grid is "You can help change the world" and I think that it is a worthwhile endeavour indeed.

The project makes use of grid computing to effectively weld together a supercomputer by scavenging free CPU cycles on user's PCs. Any time that the Windows backstop process would normally "twiddle it's thumbs" is used to compute portions of various complex calculations.

There are three projects currently active, a Fight Aids@Home , a Human Proteome Folding and a new one, Discovering Dengue Drugs . The last one is particularly close to my heart for a number of reasons, primarily because much of current research by public and private institutes is geared towards finding medical solutions to problems plaguing the richer nations where "the money is". Less research is done for killers such as Malaria and Dengue Fever as they are prevalent in the third world.

It would be great if you could think about downloading either the BOINC Client or the United Device client, signing up at World Community Grid and letting your PC do its magic. It would be nice if you could join the DataStagers team but that is only of secondary importance.

Currently the DataStagers team has 25 members and is ranked at position #776 (out of 16,712 teams)!

After installing the client you will see that your CPU shows 100% use; but as soon as you start any application such as DataStage or games the program stops using resources. You can also configure it to run only on evenings and can even tell it when to connect to the network to upload/download work.

roy · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 2:50 pm

My Favorite is the Boinc client
I havn't checked the latest other client but my boinc client smoothly hibernates when the PC is activated by any user hence not efecting my work and resumes after no activity (by a user) for several minutes.