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theSkyNet Wants Your Spare CPU Cycles
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.
SKA - The SKA will give astronomers insight into the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies after the Big Bang, the role of cosmic magnetism, the nature of gravity, and possibly life beyond Earth.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is an exploratory science that seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Better tell us when's the date the SkyNet is supposed to become self-aware.
August 29, 1997
July 25, 2003
July 25, 2004
sometime in 2005
April 21, 2011
Fear not, judgment day is like the rapture. It is always more profitable to rescheduled it the next year.
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.