Here's some information on your own network connection that you may find interesting:

I participate in several volunteer distributed computing projects based on BOINC. The projects cover the gamut from pure mathematics to hard physics to biology. The granddaddy of them all is SETI@Home. It became so popular that they generalized the software to handle other distributed computing projects, and now SETI@Home is just one of many. All are worthwhile, but in my opinion the biology-oriented World Community Grid is one of the best. Their projects range from basic research on protein folding to searching for new anti-HIV drugs.

I also participate in a non-BOINC project: Stanford University's Folding@Home, a basic science effort to understand how proteins fold. This one is unique; it's a built-in application for the Sony Playstation 3 game console. If you have a PS3, it's trivial to participate; you simply select it from the main screen. The PS3 uses IBM's Cell CPU, a highly parallel number cruncher with truly spectacular performance: up to 200 gigaflops/sec -- if you can manage to program it. Even though the Stanford code doesn't reach the theoretical maximum, the PS3 is still about 10 times faster than a late-model desktop computer for their specific algorithms.

There's one caveat about volunteer computing that's often not appreciated: you will be donating real money in the form of higher electric bills. This is true even if your computer would otherwise be on but idle. A modern high performance CPU running at full tilt is a power-hungry beast. That's why they have those huge heatsinks and fans. Intel abandoned the Pentium line when they realized it was hitting a brick wall on heat and power -- some of the later models used more than 100 watts! They replaced it with the Core CPU, a major redesign based on the more efficient Pentium-M laptop CPUs, but even the Core can draw more power than the rest of the system combined. A four-core Mac Pro draws about 300 W when fully busy. If you run it this way 24/7, and if electricity costs you 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, that works out to $395/year. So your bills will probably go up noticeably when you do this. The Playstation 3 draws about 200 W, so that's $263/year.

I strongly recommend that you not run distributed computing programs on laptops. Their CPUs also gobble power when fully loaded, though not as much as most desktops, and laptops suffer from notoriously poor cooling. If you're on battery, this will run it down much more quickly. Even if your laptop has good cooling and is on AC power, the fans will probably run at full speed and their noise will probably bother you. Leave the number crunching to the desktops and servers.

10 April 2008, Phil Karn