World Community Grid and Boinc

I’m a quiet evangelist for World Community Grid and the boinc software platform. Technology seems to me to be becoming religious to its adherents, and these projects are helping to fight diseases and find more efficient ways of creating clean energy, so it’s a difficult association to avoid once you start thinking about it.

This software utilises unused computer cycles to perform calculations on data of scientific interest, flipping proteins and discovering prime numbers and such, making your machine into a single node on a massive scientific supercomputer. You can do some good without expending any time, effort or money, and you don’t even notice it’s running. Pretty incredible, I reckon.

World Community Grid is the more corporate and slick version operated by IBM, but it runs on the same boinc software that is the free platform offered by Berkeley University, so you can run that and also pick whatever scientific projects tickle your fancy, and my fancy is much tickled by scientific projects. It’s all pretty cool. Actually, it’s all VERY cool.