Volunteer...WITH YOUR Screensaver

[hepkatmama]

This sounds similar to the SETI screensaver, where your pc runs scientific research during its downtime. Every so often (depending on your computer speed) it asks you to go online so it can turn in what its done & get fresh data to mine. its more productive then the dancing bananas u have now. go to it!

World Community Grid

The Volunteer Center of North Texas Joins World Community Grid

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, The Volunteer Center of North Texas has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of leading associations, foundations, academic institutions and companies. The Volunteer Center is encouraging its members to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

To join, members should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

The Volunteer Center is asking that members who join World Community Grid become a member of the Volunteer Center team. As part of the team, members will earn points as part of the association and as an individual. The Volunteer Center will publicize the points it earns as an association both internally and externally.

World Community Grid will address global humanitarian issues, such as:
• New and existing infectious disease research: Researching cures for HIV and AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), malaria and others.
• Genomic and disease research: The Human Proteome Folding project—World Community Grid’s first project—seeks to help identify the functions of the proteins that are coded by human genes.
• Natural disasters and hunger: World Community Grid applications can help researchers and scientists with earthquake predictions, improving crop yields and evaluating the supply of critical natural resources like water.

What is grid technology?
Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be applied on a global scale to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity.

The benefits are proven. In 2003, the IBM Corporation was one of the sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid computing. This study, using today’s largest available super computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid computing, this study was completed in less than six months and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.

IBM’s world class and open eServer and Storage products, built with IBM’s innovative and open Middleware products like WebSphere, DB2 and managed by Tivoli, serves as the technology behind grid computing. United Devices, the market leader in highly secure grid solutions for businesses of all sizes, developed the special software application that enables World Community Grid to operate. American Express and other leaders in the corporate community are partnering with World Community Grid and encouraging their employees to participate.

Join World Community Grid as part of the Volunteer Center of North Texas team today! Please go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

[Silver]

maybe I'm technologically stupid but this kinda scares me a little bit. I know my computer is tied and online by far more links than i'm aware but I run spybot, adaware and ms antispyware checks every few days to try to minimize the links. (not to mention virus/worm/trojan concerns)

Perhaps I'm a bit to paranoid. . .

what do you all think on the legitimacy / saftey?

[Dionysos]

Like anything, it could be manipulated for bad things, but I've run the United Devices project(similar to this & SETI) for years on my desktops with no ill effects. I'll stick to UD personally because it announces what it's working on(last I checked it was cancer genomes).

[zerojunkie]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Like anything, it could be manipulated for bad things, but I've run the United Devices project(similar to this & SETI) for years on my desktops with no ill effects. I'll stick to UD personally because it announces what it's working on(last I checked it was cancer genomes).

I ran that very one at a previous job...it was pretty cool...this site should do something like that.

[hepkatmama]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Like anything, it could be manipulated for bad things, but I've run the United Devices project(similar to this & SETI) for years on my desktops with no ill effects. I'll stick to UD personally because it announces what it's working on(last I checked it was cancer genomes).

what is UD? does it have a website?

[Dionysos]

http://www.grid.org/home.htm

[Silver]

good enough for me I can sign onto that . . .

[kalamu]

how interesting is this.... i just installed this and mine is working on the Human Proteome Folding Project

is this stuff for real?

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by kalamu

is this stuff for real?

Depends on which one you're asking about, but the one I posted about has years of data it has worked on. I've seen mine touch everything from cancer research to the human genome.

[johnny861]

Damn, I hope they solve the generic toilet paper problem.