Use the idle time on your computer

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy:

From the moment you turn it on the processor in your computer is churning away at a specified frequency. No matter what is going on, your processor is running full tilt, computing nothing. This amounts to both electricity and computing capacity being wasted. What if you were told that all these unused clock cycles could be used to help mankind? If that interests you, keep reading and maybe you?ll find a new competition to join.

Distributed computing is a model case where there is definitely power in numbers. A single processor would not be capable of helping much with the problems that supercomputing tries to solve, but a thousand individual processors definitely could help to put a dent into the problem. This is were distributed computing has so much power within the computing field, numbers. Super computers are simply huge arrays of computers and memory linked together in a high speed network. The project that is being crunched by a super computer is then evenly distributed between all the processors and they all crunch the numbers till the project is finished. Distributed computing does the same thing, but with computers located all over the world. With this huge network, computers of all speeds can come together to crunch numbers for scientists and cut down on wasted computer cycles.

In order to make distributed computing ?mainstream? it was necessary to make the installation and running processes as simple as possible. BOINC stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC has succeeded in doing just that with their cross-project platform. With BOINC you can sign your computer up to join a distributed computing project and start crunching with no need to know secret commands or use a command line interface. If you can install a simple program and fill out a few boxes with information, you can run BOINC.

Now you might be asking yourself "What's in it for me?" There is nothing like a good competition to bring out the best in people. To be honest, if there wasn?t some form of competition then most people wouldn?t really care much about distributed computing and helping those scientists with lab coats and huge glasses. The competition was made possible by the addition of points that are awarded by the project for successfully completed Work Units. With BOINC, when you complete a Work Unit for a project, based on your computers computing power and how long it takes, the project will award you a calculated value of points that will be added to your total. Faster computers will compute faster and generate more points and overclocked computers literally dominate in this field. If you think your computer is fast, you should see what the competition is running. With hundreds of teams and hundreds of thousands of computers, the sheer computing power that has been generated through the competitions is phenomenal.

Okay, now that I have your interest you may be asking "How do I get involved in this?" It is really rather simple. Come to the SETI.USA team message board at http://www.setiusa.net/phpBB2/index.php and ask for help, or you can go to our web site at http://www.setiusa.net/ and click on the "Join SETI.USA" link at the top of the page. SETI.USA is the best all around distributed computing team in the world and is involved in almost every project available. We have a wonderful community that is very competitive and supportive of all members. So come help us as we help the scientists and dominate the world of distributed computing.