MichaelJ on Participate in distributed computing

Distributed computing is a way for you to volunteer idle time on your computer to help solve big problems -- be they in biomedical research, number theory, particle physics, or the search for intelligent aliens (the little green kind). Basically, a central computer breaks lots of problems up into small chunks, which get sent to your computer for processing when you're not using it. The two that spring to my mind are BOINC [1] and Folding@home [2]. Folding@home is a Stanford project that simulates the folding of proteins in order to predict and find cures for diseases. BOINC is actually an infrastructure; once you get a BOINC client, you can participate in any number of projects using it. (I use BOINC, and participate in climate prediction and biomedical research.)

I know that Wash U (my chunk of the world) has a Folding@home team (#40211), and I'm sure we can get one started in the BOINC projects.

[1] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
[2] http://folding.standford.edu