Post by Keith Heitmann on Dec 14, 2003 16:21:03 GMT -5
If you feel like your not doing anything constructive with your current PC and it remains idle most of the time between your favorite game or program, you may want to check into contributing your computer's time to something worthwhile.
For the past 5 years, going on six, I have been taking part and running the Seti@home application full time on two computers, first my old P2 450Mhz, and now my new P4 3Ghz machine. In the first five years I completed some 1400 work units and transmitted them back to U. of C. Berkley, the home of the project and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. In the past six months I have completed another 1400 work units thanks to my new super PC.
The small application can be setup to run as a background application full time, or as a screensaver mode only. There are also 3rd party applications that run faster than the official program. I use one called Seti Driver. You donwload small workunits and when they are done being processed by your application they are either automatically uploaded or manually triggered for upload to the home site and a new work unit is downloaded to work on. There are thousands of people participating in this program worldwide. Your persoan stats are maintained by Seti@home and you can check your stats against others if you want.
A new program that is in testing by the same folks is called Astropulse and basically functions the same way but with a newer program that is in beta test at this time. You can sign up to help them beta test the new application program and process some AP workunits at the same time.
One other program called Folding Protein out of Stanford Univ. does research on the subject using the same distributed super-computer idea initiated by Seti.
And the last one that just launched about 3 months ago, is for Climate Prediction. I just signed up for this one today and I am currently running both Seti and the CP applications full time in the background right now to see how they behave together and if my computer suffers any lag or performance problems in so doing.
Climate Prediction basically runs a simulation of the world climate on your computer for a period of some 50 years or so from 1810 to 1825, 1825 to 1850, and 2050 to 2065 in three phases. Depending on your systems speed it could take 10 to 20 days or longer to process one work unit.
So if you want to do something constructive with your computer. Sign up for one of the programs above. They are all free and you can quit anytime. You don't have to leave them running full time, but the Climate Prediction people recommend that if you don't run your computer for long periods of time to not download their application.
For the past 5 years, going on six, I have been taking part and running the Seti@home application full time on two computers, first my old P2 450Mhz, and now my new P4 3Ghz machine. In the first five years I completed some 1400 work units and transmitted them back to U. of C. Berkley, the home of the project and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. In the past six months I have completed another 1400 work units thanks to my new super PC.
The small application can be setup to run as a background application full time, or as a screensaver mode only. There are also 3rd party applications that run faster than the official program. I use one called Seti Driver. You donwload small workunits and when they are done being processed by your application they are either automatically uploaded or manually triggered for upload to the home site and a new work unit is downloaded to work on. There are thousands of people participating in this program worldwide. Your persoan stats are maintained by Seti@home and you can check your stats against others if you want.
A new program that is in testing by the same folks is called Astropulse and basically functions the same way but with a newer program that is in beta test at this time. You can sign up to help them beta test the new application program and process some AP workunits at the same time.
One other program called Folding Protein out of Stanford Univ. does research on the subject using the same distributed super-computer idea initiated by Seti.
And the last one that just launched about 3 months ago, is for Climate Prediction. I just signed up for this one today and I am currently running both Seti and the CP applications full time in the background right now to see how they behave together and if my computer suffers any lag or performance problems in so doing.
Climate Prediction basically runs a simulation of the world climate on your computer for a period of some 50 years or so from 1810 to 1825, 1825 to 1850, and 2050 to 2065 in three phases. Depending on your systems speed it could take 10 to 20 days or longer to process one work unit.
So if you want to do something constructive with your computer. Sign up for one of the programs above. They are all free and you can quit anytime. You don't have to leave them running full time, but the Climate Prediction people recommend that if you don't run your computer for long periods of time to not download their application.