For those that haven't heard of this: scientists have a good idea what they are looking for when it comes to the cure for cancer, but there are some many calculations that need to be made to find the cure that even their super computers will take tens of years to find the cure. So with distributed processing, you are telling your machine to take its spare CPU cycles and process the cure for cancern with them instead of essentially wasting them for nothing.

I'm a very avid and **** person about my computer's performance, and especially hate CPU hogs (programs that demand CPU power and won't give it up for other apps). I don't know about other distributed projects, but United Devices' cure for cancer project's plug-in is absolutely perfect about not taking any of your computer's performance away from you... it only takes what your computer is literally throwing away. And seriously.. 98% of the time, most people's computers only use about 1-5% of their CPU cycles.

So what a lot of message boards and other online communities have started to do is form teams that compete with other distributed computing project teams. They even award prizes- which the amount of processing power your team contributes will directly effect your odds.

I seriously think this would be a great way for Stuntlife to contribute to a very worthy cause in the community. I have it setup on both my PC at home and at work.

The cure for cancer program is especially nice- it hides in your system tray and only takes what would otherwise be wasted in terms of CPU cycles. If you are curious you can even watch a very pretty (and I'm sure very technical if I had any clue what it was doing) diagram showing the particular strand of DNA, atoms, and electrons that your computer is calculating at that moment.

This is a worthwhile thing to do, and is a good alternative to sending a check. If you've ever lost loved ones to cancer, you should appreciate this effort. You can download the program here: http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm Follow the rest of the directions on the site, and you're all set.

I will talk to Greg and see if I can make this a sticky on all the boards, or at least on the Open Discussion forum. Then maybe we can create a Stuntlife team and help fight cancer together.

 

you gotta be kidding me

 

What's funny?

 

so is this legit i have mad computer parts in the attick in my shop, lmfao

 

For my pc to process their data, the data needs to be transferred to my pc, then transferred back when its done. That transfer would use much more processor power than if they were to do the number crunching themselves.

 

Not true. The processing takes place on YOUR machine. The results are then sent back to the host to be integrated with other results gathered from other host machines.

This article has more information: http://www.ud.com/solutions/howitworks.htm

 

I think this is a great idea. My parents have a computer that has broadband and since my sister and I have grown up and moved out of the house, the computer just sits there, always on, and neither my mother nor fater ever use it. First thing when I get home I"m going to donate the scrap heap to science!