World Community Grid
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Help cure Ebola by donating your smartphone's idle time
You know how your smartphone and computer just do nothing when you're not using them? You can now put those slackers to work in a noble cause: helping cure the Ebola virus. IBM's World Community Grid has teamed up with scientists from the Scripps Research Institute with the "Outsmart Ebola Together" project to tackle the deadly plague. The laboratory has been studying the virus for the last decade, and has mapped potential weak points in Ebola proteins. But the process of narrowing down promising drugs is computationally intensive, which is where you and your device come in.
BOINC client lets Mac users contribute cycles
If you encountered a labful or officeful of Macs in the early 2000s, chances are good that a bunch of them were running SETI@Home, the 'contributed computing' project to search through radioastronomy signals for the telltale signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. While the classic SETI@Home application was closed down in December of 2005, the successor client for grid science is alive and well: BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, recently updated to version 5.8.15 and happily Universal Binary. OS X users are full peer clients along with Windows and Linux machines.You say finding LGM isn't your cup of MIPS? You can contribute to plenty of other projects affecting life here on Earth via the BOINC client and the World Community Grid, a 'meta-project' that aggregates work on several key initiatives (protein folding, cancer, climate and AIDS research) and lets you split up your processing power between your choices. You can sign up and start helping immediately; if you like, join the TUAW team and have your contributions tracked with fellow Macnatics. Note that the BOINC client from boinc.berkeley.edu is several versions newer than the one you get from WCG (5.8.15 vs. 5.4.9), so best to download from the source and then register.Of course, in the interest of environmental sensibility: please don't leave your machine powered on just to run BOINC; save a watt and let it go to sleep when it's truly idle.
