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And other assorted distro-computing tasks. Hell, my old x1800's stopped being supported for the current Folding software years ago.

A nice list of distro computing projects.

Another nice list of such projects.

is listed on my site: http://distributedcomputing.info/ . If you leave your computer on all the time and it isn't doing anything useful when you aren't using it, please look through these projects and pick one or more to contribute to.

Actually, there are several available programs to do this kind of search. Here's a list. Ignore the first three that do performance statistics; there are better ones below them.

If you want a single specific, easy-to-use app, I'd suggest DepSpid. (I haven't used it specifically, but all projects on the BOINC platform are very similar.)

Of course efficiency is important. And in my perspective efficiency is considerably good for the latest computers. Every computer or software improvement that's made which increases processing power somewhere around 25% while gaining only a 100 watts in power consumption or some other proportional change is an improvement; there is the volunteer opportunity to use idle processing power on distributed computing projects.

You're not thinking this through very well, Tom St. Denis.

The SETI@Home project, which analyses data collected from Arecibo, pioneered Internet-based distributed computing employing the PCs of the general public. Since then, the know-how that went into that project has been used for many other distributed computing efforts.

Some of those efforts, such as the biological and medical research Folding@Home and FightAIDS@Home projects, surely fit your definition of "more vital science". And were it not for Arecibo, those research efforts would not have been possible.

It's nice to see Sony formalize something which was attempted informally on the PS2. Some distributed computing projects, like Distributed Folding enabled PS2 users to run distributed computing projects on their game consoles. But since users had to install Linux on their consoles and connect their consoles to the Internet consoles, not many users contributed to these projects.

Now with the PS3, users won't have to know how to install Linux on their console, and won't have to download any distributed computing project software. They can just enable the project software on the PS3 and let it do its thing (and they can watch the fancy screensaver and learn more about protein folding in the process). And if the distributed computing software can be updated, the Folding@home researchers (and hopefully researchers from other distributed computing projects) will be able to learn how to make the best use of the Cell processor.

"of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)"

What drug companies does the Wall Street Journal own? Also, here is a complete list of distributed computing projects open to public participation. Back up your argument by showing us which projects are being run by drug companies, which projects are researching something other than what they actually say they are researching, and which projects are being run in order to create profitable products for drug companies.

We're waiting...

I have seen the argument that drug companies are profiting from our donated CPU cycles many, many times, but no one can ever back it up with proof. It's time to put that argument to rest and to support these important projects which will benefit the global public.

"I'd rather see extra cycles go towards things that have a larger impact for people on Earth: weather analysis, drug creation, protein folding, etc."

Cycles are going to those things, in addition to SETI@home. See a complete list (in English) of projects that you can contribute your CPU cycles to on my distributed computing projects page.

The question is are you paranoid enough?

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?N ewsID=5466
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/27/142223 0
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/toolkit/security/e mail/0,39027176,39168559,00.htm
http://www.gridtoday.com/03/0526/030526.html
http://distributedcomputing.info/news.html

This thing has a lot of people's names on it. If it flops someone has to take the blame.

I'd like to contribute to the project but it doesn't have a Boinc client? Other than the original project page, all I could find is this and it doesn't say anything about Boinc. Too bad. You'd think they'd try to take advantage of the large install base rather than require people to install an additional client.

I don't know if you are aware of all the many other worth distributed computing efforts that exist. Two of the best are Folding@home and World Community Grid Human Proteome Project. Hers a good website: http://distributedcomputing.info/updates.html

While you are reading this book, put your computer to work helping to prove the hypothesis in the Zetagrid project (see my short summary of the project here). If your computer can run Java applications, it can run the small ZetaGrid client. In the 3.3 years the project has run, participants have discovered almost 1 trillion "nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function."