Nerdfighters Gazette

Many of you have probably heard of the SETI@HOME project where SETI records data, and sends it to several volunteers over the internet to have other computers analyze the data. While cool, I don’t see how it’ll do very much good for helping the world. Luckily there are many other projects and researchers using grid computing.

The World Community Grid is one. It has projects you can contribute to like a cure for AIDS, Cancer, Muscular Dystophy, maximizing crop yields, and several others. They send your computer parts of problems, your computer calculates the answers, and then it sends the answers back to them. It’s like a supercomputer, but distributed.  If 365 people are running it, then a year of computing can be done in a day.

All you have to do is:

• Go HERE (this link automatically puts you on the Nerdfighters team when you register)
• Sign up.
• Download the program.
• Pick the projects you want. (Make sure you choose to have other projects sent if the ones you picked aren’t available)
• Let it run.

Within the team, we can track how many hours we’ve contributed and there’s even a point system.  It’s really easy and I don’t see why everyone couldn’t do it. You can even edit the settings to control when it runs and how much of your processor it uses.

The top team on there has 16,000 members. I think we could easily blow them away.

All research conducted as part of the world community grid is in the public domain.