Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, September 6th, 2005

Ever wanted to try out grid computing?

Ok, while it now only costs $49K to have your own grid, that’s still a bit steep for my house. On a smaller budget (say $0), you can opt to plug into a grid and do something good for the world. The World Community Grid uses spare cycles in your PC to process human protein folding. Basically, they mapped out the human gene sequence a few years ago and now need a TON of processing power to help analyze what it all means. The effect will be a huge leap forward in science. Signing up is easy and the grid app will shut down when you’re actively using your PC. What can you lose?

The only downside is this grid app only has a Windows client at this time… I know, I know… But hey, install it on that “other” PC you have that still has Windows on it and let it do something good for once. You can download WCF here.