Hi All,
For those of you who haven't heard of it I thought I'd let you know about the
World Community Grid. To quote from the site:
Making a difference has never been easier! Grid technology is simple and safe to use. To start, you download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer.
When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!
I like the idea that when I'm not using my computer that it's doing something useful with its time. There are nearly 250,000 people and nearly 500,000 computers on the grid running calculations on worthy causes such as combatting Muscular Dystrophy, Cancer, AIDs and more.
For more info on Distributed Computing in general here is a link to a
Wikipedia article on the subject.
For more info on the WCG
click here.