by Alan Bonnici

Created on: March 30, 2010

Giving is one of the noblest deeds a person can do to another. Be it money, time, material goods or life-saving products such as blood, the knowledge that you are helping someone is great for both the giver as well as the receiver. This year you can add another form of giving to your list; donate your computing resources. This is possible thanks to a branch known as distributed computing. 

Distributed computing consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through the Internet. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal. There are many distributed computing projects you can participate in. The largest project is called Folding@Home. This project is managed by the University of Stanford. It deals with research in protein folding and contributes towards understanding and finding cures for diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many Cancers.  Other research projects relate to climate study, mathematics, physics, astronomy as well as art, games and computing.

In order to add your computer to this network you would need to download and install a program onto your computer. This program will receive tasks your computer will be digging its electronic teeth into and will transmit the results back once the tasks have been completed. This program also provides feedback on how your computer has helped with the overall project and allows you to control the amount of resources you dedicate to the distributed task. For example you can limit your computer’s participation to distributed tasks to those instances when you are not using your computer. This setting ensures that the computer does not slow down when you are using it.

Irrespective of what type of computer or games console you have, you can participate in a distributed computing project and donate a few of your computing cycles to a research project of your choice. Just Google “List of distributed computing projects” and in a few minutes you could be doing something good for humanity. The Wikipedia link that normally comes up at the beginning of the search will list those organisations that have been documented by this encyclopaedia.  Scrolling down the list will reveal other lesser known organisations you can lend a few of your computing cycles to. Armed with this information you will be spoilt for choice as to who will get your space CPU cycles.

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