Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

theSkyNet Wants Your Spare CPU Cycles

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-just-bet-it-does dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of PC users are being called on to donate their spare CPU cycles to help create a massive grid computing engine to process terabytes of radio astronomy data as part of theSkyNet project. It will be used for, among other things, processing the huge amount of data expected to flow off Australia's forthcoming Square Kilometre Array telescope." One can only assume that "other things" will include achieving sentience and finding John Connor.

2 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great choice of name by Wolfling1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why not? Just about everything else in the Australian outback is deadly to humans.

  2. They can have them. But... by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd happily donate my CPU cycles to them. I have 4 cores here sitting doing mostly nothing, and I fully agree it is for the most part completely wasted silicon for the 23 hours a day I don't play games.

    But I will have to send them my power bill. While my processor cycles are free, the energy usage is not. The difference between a computer sitting idly all year and running full pelt on the processor can easily be $100+ from a back of the envelope calculation, the GPU can also amount to the same.