Advance science while promoting the FairTax
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a computer system that allows scientists to submit work that has large computational requirements. On the other end, individual desktop computer users can download a small program that chews through tiny pieces of this work during idle time and then submits the results back to the scientists when complete.
There are many projects that different groups of scientists have waiting to be worked on. The original project was seti@home which analyzes radio waves from space in hopes of finding evidence of intelligent life.
As you can imagine, with enough desktop computers working at once, alot of work can get done. As of today, BOINC has 560,000 desktop computers processing one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
To increase the number of users and encourage competition, desktop users can form “teams” to combine the work that they complete, thus competing with other teams and drawing attention to their group.
One such team is the FairTax team that is working on the rosetta@home project. The project is attempting to model 3D shapes of proteins to understand how they interact with other molecules. The FairTax team has 32 members. If I am reading the documentation correctly, I believe that the amount of work that this group has completed to date is equal to that which an average desktop computer would do if it was used full time for 118 years.
So if you’re interested, download the software and join the team.
Here are some links:
