Alternative Energy News Blog Celebrates!
distribution of users of the Folding at Home distributed computing project
The Alternative Energy News Blog celebrates surpassing one hundred subscribers to our syndicated feed today. You can find the link to our feed on the bottom right of the homepage entitled "RSS and Atom Site Feed".
In order to celebrate we're going off topic on this post. You may or may not be aware that your computer's processor isn't being used anywhere near its full capacity most of the time. This is therefore a waste of the resources which were put into its manufacture and the electricity which powers it.
Instead of this you can install a small program which makes use of your computer's processing power when you're not using it by performing calculations for non-profit medical and scientific research for Stanford University. There are currently over one million CPUs registered. I have personally been using the program for over two years with no problems.
You can find out more and download the program here:
Stanford University's non-profit Folding at Home Project
If you do sign up I would appreciate it if you use my team number 39181 so I know you found out about the project through this blog (disclaimer: I receive no financial benefit for this).
Also if you have a blog I would ask that you encourage your readers to sign up.
posted by James at 6:19 am
2 Comments:
You may also investigate http://climateprediction.net/, which is part of the BOINC consortium. They use your computer to refine models of global warming for the IPCC. It may be more directly related to encouraging alternative energy.
Thanks for your comment.
I was already aware of climateprediction.net
I didn't post their project for a number of reasons:
1) the sign-up process is a lot more involved than folding@home and I suspect may put some people off
2) I believe while it's important to understand the problem(s), the majority of time should be spent focusing on the solution.
3) There are a lot more reasons to switch from fossil fuel use to clean renewable energy including:
a) fossil fuels are finite and are being depleted
b) our economies, food supply (through natural gas based fertilisers with 10 calories of fossil fuels being used to produce 1 calorie of food) and way of life are dependent on significant amounts of energy
c) pollution
d) geopolitical instability/ conflict
e) to provide electricity to the developing world
The arguments for switching to alternative energy sources go way beyond climate change.
However of course I would encourage readers to sign up for folding@home or climateprediction.net in preference to having their processor being underutilised most of the time.
Ideally I would love it if someone were to come up with a distributed computer project for alternative energy research. However I do not have the technical background to know if any area currently being investigated is suitable for a distributed project.
Anyone know of one?
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