Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

The World Community Grid is in my opinion one of the best kept secrets in the world.  Here is an organization that is providing millions of dollars of computing services to worthy causes, and it is receiving little to no recognition or publicity.  This organization, had developed a system for any computer user to donate the unused CPU time of their computer to this worthy cause.

Here is the basics of how it works.  You register with them and download the World Community Grid program to your computer.  That’s all you need to do. The World Community Grid will run in the background as a low priority process, meaning anything you do will be higher priority and your computer will process it first.  When the World Community Grid runs, every once in a while it will download work packets, these are safe and secure packets of data, for calculations, that your computer will perform when it is not busy.

This may not seem like a lot at first, but your computer is idle most of the time.  Suppose that your computer is only idle for 2 hours out of every 24 (As a professional geek, my average is 8 hours idle) .  So you contribute 2 hours a day toward this project.  Now imagine half a million users world-wide all giving 2 hours a day, now we have 1 million hours a day of processing, that is over 114 years of computation time donated every day.

Now the real stats for yesterday was 327 years, 99 days, 5 hours 58 minutes, and 5 seconds. I find that amazing!!!  Instead of researchers having to spend millions of dollars to get computer time to perform the analysis they need, they are able to use this program and save that money.  That is both green and economically sensible.

What programs you might ask is this benefiting?  Cancer research, clean water, clean energy, aids research, and many other worthy causes!!!

I challenge everyone to not only look into this, but to sign up and donate your spare computer time!

World Community Grid

By Jeffery Miller

I am known for being able to quickly decipher difficult problems to assist development teams in producing a solution. I have been called upon to be the Team Lead for multiple large-scale projects. I have a keen interest in learning new technologies, always ready for a new challenge.

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