Volunteer Your PC - Make a Difference - Find a Cure!
My computer is now helping to fight cancer…. how you might ask? I simply signed up with Grid.org!
Grid.org is a provider of distributed computing services. This means they combine the computing power of tens of thousands of computers from all over the world by using the idle time and unused processor cycles to work on big computing projects that would normally take enormous amounts of time.
One of the projects they work on is the search for a cure for cancer. This project is called the United Devices Cancer Research Project, or “UD” for short. The idea is to check certain chemical molecules against certain proteins that are thought to be key elements in cancer growth. However, there are millions and millions of combinations to check, and doing this on only a few computers in a lab would take a very long time.
This is where regular computer users like us come in. By installing a small program on your computer Grid.org will send your computer a UD work unit to complete. Your computer will work on it when it is idle, using only unused processor cycles, not interfering with anything you do on your computer. When the work unit is completed, it uploads it to the Grid.org web site and retrieves the next unit to work on.
You probably get the idea. With thousands and thousands of computer users across the planet installing the UD software and donating their free unused computing time, processing can be distributed over many computers to help speed up the process.
So, do your part in finding the cure for cancer…. use the link at the top to download the UD agent from grid.org. I’ll be posting how many work units my PC has completed every once in awhile… see if you can keep up!
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