One of the things I’ve always found interesting is our level of ingenuity. There always seems something out there that some of us are wasting and someone else comes up with a good use for.
Take computer idle time. In the olden days it was just wasted. Then along came screensavers and we quite happily watched our monitors for hours while software we paid good money for displayed graphics and visual effects. Initially to actually save burning images into the monitors but as monitors improved just for the fun of it.
As well as this we also had programs that defragmented your computer, tidied and archived your files and a few other housekeeping tasks that would otherwise interfere with your daily work.
Then along came someone with an idea for grid computers. Your idle time was used to connect to a remote server download some data and then process it. Sending the result back to the main server. The first one I used was SETI@Home where this was used to search the background noise of the universe for signs of life. Others came along and I have also supplied idle time to find a cure for cancer, crack encrypted files and helped solve mathematical problems. Eventually anything and everything that needs a massive amount of sheer brute force has some code you can install on your system so you can contribute.
Now it may seem that it is not suitable for those that switch their computer off at the end of the day but that is not true. You will be surprised how much modern computers actually spend doing nothing but waiting for you to press a key or click a mouse. Followed by a few frantic seconds of loading data and then waiting for the next command. This free time can be useful and in case you are worried. The instant you tell the computer to do something these background tasks simply pause until the system goes idle again. Totally invisible to you. Then of course if your system is on all night, either some sort of server or because you are downloading P2P or something it can make productive use of the idle time here as well.
Now I found plenty of scientific projects using the BOINC software here which includes SETI@Home. For code cracking there is Distributed.Net which has some projects here. Additionally there is World Community Grid who also have several projects to donate your time to here. If you want to donate your idle time to charity you can sign up here. They sell your idle time to companies to solve science and maths problems and donate water, wheat, rainforest or education from the cash generated. More projects can be found off this link. Scroll down to the ‘Volunteer Computing’ section and jump from there.
There are many more deserving projects out there that I am unaware of. If you have a deserving project yourself then you could make your own idle project. It’s not for the faint of heart though but you could enable the resolution of one of the mysteries of science or anything that just needs a massive amount of computer power to resolve.
One word of warning though. Modern computer makers are aware of this wasted idle time and some anticipate it by shutting down the computer processor whilst idle to save generating heat and wasting power. Thus they do not cool the system sufficiently for 100% processing power for hours on end. Laptops in particular are targets of this as they never do server type activities, have limited power storage and cooling facilities. If you allow these programs to run full time you never have any idle time so they can heat up and use a lot more power. So unless you know exactly what the effect will be don’t allow them to use more than, say 50%, of your idle time. It’ll still be good for your chosen project and won’t have much of an impact during the day. On servers or PCs without these enhancements then go for it. 100% utilisation.
So do your bit. Don’t just waste all this processing power. Do something productive for mankind as well.
Productive use of wasted time
One of the things I’ve always found interesting is our level of ingenuity. There always seems something out there that some of us are wasting and someone else comes up with a good use for.
Take computer idle time. In the olden days it was just wasted. Then along came screensavers and we quite happily watched our monitors for hours while software we paid good money for displayed graphics and visual effects. Initially to actually save burning images into the monitors but as monitors improved just for the fun of it.
As well as this we also had programs that defragmented your computer, tidied and archived your files and a few other housekeeping tasks that would otherwise interfere with your daily work.
Then along came someone with an idea for grid computers. Your idle time was used to connect to a remote server download some data and then process it. Sending the result back to the main server. The first one I used was SETI@Home where this was used to search the background noise of the universe for signs of life. Others came along and I have also supplied idle time to find a cure for cancer, crack encrypted files and helped solve mathematical problems. Eventually anything and everything that needs a massive amount of sheer brute force has some code you can install on your system so you can contribute.
Now it may seem that it is not suitable for those that switch their computer off at the end of the day but that is not true. You will be surprised how much modern computers actually spend doing nothing but waiting for you to press a key or click a mouse. Followed by a few frantic seconds of loading data and then waiting for the next command. This free time can be useful and in case you are worried. The instant you tell the computer to do something these background tasks simply pause until the system goes idle again. Totally invisible to you. Then of course if your system is on all night, either some sort of server or because you are downloading P2P or something it can make productive use of the idle time here as well.
Now I found plenty of scientific projects using the BOINC software here which includes SETI@Home. For code cracking there is Distributed.Net which has some projects here. Additionally there is World Community Grid who also have several projects to donate your time to here. If you want to donate your idle time to charity you can sign up here. They sell your idle time to companies to solve science and maths problems and donate water, wheat, rainforest or education from the cash generated. More projects can be found off this link. Scroll down to the ‘Volunteer Computing’ section and jump from there.
There are many more deserving projects out there that I am unaware of. If you have a deserving project yourself then you could make your own idle project. It’s not for the faint of heart though but you could enable the resolution of one of the mysteries of science or anything that just needs a massive amount of computer power to resolve.
One word of warning though. Modern computer makers are aware of this wasted idle time and some anticipate it by shutting down the computer processor whilst idle to save generating heat and wasting power. Thus they do not cool the system sufficiently for 100% processing power for hours on end. Laptops in particular are targets of this as they never do server type activities, have limited power storage and cooling facilities. If you allow these programs to run full time you never have any idle time so they can heat up and use a lot more power. So unless you know exactly what the effect will be don’t allow them to use more than, say 50%, of your idle time. It’ll still be good for your chosen project and won’t have much of an impact during the day. On servers or PCs without these enhancements then go for it. 100% utilisation.
So do your bit. Don’t just waste all this processing power. Do something productive for mankind as well.