Curing Cancer, One Computer at a Time

I know a lot of people who leave their computers on for most of the day, or sometimes around the clock. They like the convenience of being able to walk up to it and instantly be productive. Or, perhaps they use their desktop computer at a media server, etc. That typically is just a waste of power most of the time. So, if you are one of those people, how about you take a look at the World Community Grid project. 

The software program called BOINC allows your computer to participate in distributed computing - break up a very large problem or problems into pieces and have thousands or millions of computers work on it in sections. Normally, this would be a problem that you might give to a super computer. That can be very expensive and difficult to schedule.

Instead, projects such as Clean Energy, Curing Muscular Dystrophy and Curing Cancer can get resources from groups of folks or individual volunteers all over the world. All you are giving up is a little CPU time on your side. The client itself is easy to install and configure. The sign-up process - well, just make sure you are a little bit patient and feel rather inquisitive when you make the choice to move forward. It's a multi-part process that sometimes can make you feel lost. However, if you persevere, the installation itself is easy as pie.

Once you've been running, you also can see your statistics on-line and how you are contributing to the effort. For example, I've been running this since late June and have returned 510 results. That's good enough to rank me at 109,000th. Ok, so it's not that great in context, but I feel like it is helping - and what's wrong with that? :-)