I’m helping conquer cancer, want to join me?
There are many ways you can help people, from sparing money and time to just carrying shopping for little old ladies.
I don’t really do the shopping thing, as they may think I’m trying to steal it…. I’m such a glass half empty kind of guy sometimes.
Back to my point.
I’m helping, on my home PC to help conquer cancer, fight AIDS at home and a few other projects.
“Pfffftttt you can’t do that!”, I hear you yell at your screen.
“You home pc is just good for playing games and reading webpages about how to not suck at games (that you pay for, your crazy!)”, you mutter. Well, yes I’m a little crazy, but that’s not the point.
“Why would you do this, and more importantly how do you do this?”, I hear you ask. Ah, read on my good friend, read on….
Through magic (science), the internet and Distributed Computing!
Click the link for a thorough intro to this fantastic thing that is distributed computing. The short version, take a big project, break it up and send it to thousna ds of pcs around the world. They do some stuff and send the result back. The thousands of pcs around the worl do work on these projects when the owners are not playing games (or other things one can do on a pc).
I currently have the BIONIC client installed, found from the World Community Grid website
Just go to the site, register, install the client and login. Once your computer is on the net and idle, it will download chunks of stuff to do, and then send it back.
I’m currently (or in the pas have) helped with the following worthwhile endevours:
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
Help Conquer Cancer
Nutritious Rice for the World
The Clean Energy Project
I would imagine it’s hard to find anyone that would look at that list and decicde helping is awaste of time. Please send 5 mins seting up your pc (or pcs, home and work) to help with these worthwhile projects.
You get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping people, it costs you so close to nothing it’s not worth caculating and you might help make the world better for your fellow man (in the non-gender specific sense of the word)
If anyone has any questions, feel free to e-mail or comment below.
I was going to put a link in here to my project stats so far, but the website reporting them is playing up. I will update in a day or so once it’s working.
