nun bet

I recently learned about a cool project called the World Community Grid. According to their website:

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.

One of the projects affiliated with the World Community Grid is the Fight AIDS@Home project. Here’s how it works:

To support FightAIDS@Home, you simply download a free software program from World Community Grid that runs “in the background” on your computer. This is called the FightAIDS@Home client, and it processes information (in this case using the drug design software AutoDock) and evaluates prospective candidates for drug discovery. The FightAIDS@Home client uses idle processor cycles that would otherwise go to waste. FightAIDS@Home captures the otherwise wasted cycles of your computer and applies them to model the evolution of drug resistance and to design drugs necessary to fight AIDS. When your computer has finished a FightAIDS@Home computation, the FightAIDS@Home results are packed up and sent back to The Scripps Research Institute, ready for Scripps researchers to collect and analyze them.

Then when you are using your computer and it needs cycles, FightAIDS@Home instantly and automatically turns those resources back over to the program you are using.

Nothing like volunteering while you read your morning blogs!