Einstein@Home
You can sit there and cry that the government isn't wasting everybody else's money to fund stem cell research or fighting AIDS... whatever. You could do that or you could actually do something about it. No, I don't mean wearing some stupid useless ribbon during an awards show to make yourself feel better and prove to people that you "care". I'm not talking about government mandated "donations" (taxes), either. But, honest to God: charity. You know, that wonderful by-product of captialism. I'm talking about donating your computer's time and energy consumption to a greater cause.
One distributed computing project in particular, LHC@Home has been helping the scientists get the LHC, up and running with more accuracy and quicker results. In fact, I'm just waiting for the eventual "42" that the LHC will spit out. Whoops... I guess I should have put a spoiler warning in there, huh? But, that's just one project. I currently participate in SETI@Home, LHC@Home, Einstein@Home, and Rosetta@Home. I'm planning on building a 6-PC Linux grid that will be dedicated to my BOINC projects, 24/7/365. I will be paying the energy costs, the materials, etc. Why? Because distributed computing isn't a charity that lines the pockets of politicians. It's not a charity that blows $0.80 of every dollar, before it even gets to the cause. It's a form of charity that is proven to get results.
Besides all that charity crap, it makes for a great screensaver.
The thing that has really blown me away over the years is Moore's Law. I started crunching SETI@Home numbers back in 1999 on a 486 machine running 24/7/365. As of today, I've accumulated more credit than 91% of the rest of the world's BOINC users. For SETI alone, I've easily processed over 54.56 Quadrillion floating point operations (since the project moved to BOINC). That doesn't include all of the processing I did before under a different username, either. Nowadays, I'm crunching work units on a AMD Phenom Quad-Core processor. It processes more work units in one day, than the 486 did in a year. The computation power curve is amazing and after 9 years of straight work and stats - I'm awestruck to see the difference first hand.
What a long and strange eight years it has been.
So... Download and join the number crunching today! Join the 108 Dragons team and make a real contribution to society without forcing everyone else to pay for it. Years from now, when your kid's children ask you what you did back in the day of ancient computing - you can tell them that you didn't just complain about the problems of the world. You were a contributing part of the solution.
Well that.. and I don't want to have to pay my credit cards off. We really need to get the LHC to create a black hole to consume the earth before my next billing cycle. Thanks!
