LatinaLista — Have you ever dreamed of being the person who finds a cure for cancer? Or maybe a cure for malaria in Africa? Or even helping scientists with the study of global warming?
Well, there’s now a way you can and you don’t even have to have college degree — just a computer and a Facebook account!
The program, a collaboration between Intel, the National Science Foundation and Facebook, is Progress Thru Processors and revolves around the concept of “volunteer computing.” The idea is that while your computer is idling one of three organizations identified by the National Science Foundation, will be utilizing your computer’s processor for their research.
The program capitalizes on times when a PC is not using the full extent of its processor power to run complex calculations for one of the research projects and sends the information back to the project’s home servers.
The program will only be active when the computer’s processor is not being fully utilized; when the computer needs the full processor performance, the program will sit idle.
The three research projects that are immediately available for the program are: Rosetta@home, which is searching for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases; Climateprediction.net, which is looking to finding better predictive models for climate change; and Africa@home, a study that is searching for ways to combat malaria in Africa. All three require heavy computational analysis to achieve their goals
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To participate, go to the Facebook page of Progress Thru Processors, download the application and literally do nothing but sit back and know you’re helping the world.
