There are currently a number of projects that harness the idle cycles of thousands of PC to create a distributed virtual computer with the capacity to tackle problems that would otherwise be insolvable. To add a little excitement, people organize into teams and try to outdo each other by turning in more computations (or being the team to first identify a signal from outer space!).
I have created a team for the members of the Willow Glen High School Graduating Class of 1964.
There are two projects:
SETI:
The SETI@home is a commensal SETI sky survey at the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center's 305-meter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This is the largest radio telescope in the world. The telescope has a fixed dish 305 meters (1000 feet) across that is built into a sinkhole in rugged Karst terrain. The large surface of this dish is over 20 acres with about 18 acres or 26 football fields of available aperture! The dish reflects and concentrates the weak celestial signals on the receiving antennas hung 450 feet above. Since the dish is fixed and can't swivel, the receiving antennas are mounted on a bow-shaped track that allows them to "look at" objects as far as 20 degrees from the zenith (directly overhead). This bow-shaped arm is itself mounted on a circular track to allow the antennas to follow an object as it moves across the sky due to the earth's rotation. These two motions give the telescope the ability to scan a good portion of the sky.
SETI@home data tapes from the Arecibo telescope are divided into small "work units". Each work unit consists of 107 seconds of data from a given 9,765 Hz sub-band. Work units are then sent over the internet to hundreds of thousands of client "screen saver" programs around the world for the bulk of the data analysis looking for indications of extraterrestrial civilization.
SETI@home is one of the original distributed projects and has over 15,000 teams in 209 countries.
Climate Prediction:
Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try to produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. Climate change, and our response to it, is issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs, and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.
The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') they hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow then to improve their understanding of how sensitive the models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow them to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, they will be able to improve their understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.
Climate Prediction is a relatively new project with 2,000 teams in 143 countries
The projects use you idle cpu resources and should not impact any of your normal work. However, if you are doing something that is particualry intensive, you can right-click on the icon in the task bar and either suspend or exit the application.
Then you can go here to see how our team is doing: