Charity Work @ Home

There is a program I found out about maybe a month ago called 'World Community Grid', which is a program created by IBM (the current creators of the world's faster computer Blue-Gene/L) to conduct research into human proteins and organic processes for scientfic needs and advantages. Visit the homepage here.

This is how it works: Once registered, your computer will connect to the World Community Grid server and download the first project, 'Human Proteome Folding'. All you then need to do is set your preferences (like how many GB you will allocate it), and then whenever you're not using your computer, like if a screensaver is running, the WCG Agent can be run to continue its research. And when you come back, the program will close and you won't even notice it was running. If you don't want it to run itself, you can load the program manually and it will sit in the System Tray if you need to open it.

So that means that its a very good global method of using the wasted energy for good instead of bad. And because there are so many contributors to this research, many projects are submitted and overall makes a whole load of processing energy! Accordingly, this project would have taken 12 years to do, but because so many people have taken part, it has been completed in 12 months! The next project is called 'Fight AIDS @ Home'. I leave it on most of the time, and although the process CPU usage says its taking 99% of my resources, I can still work perfectly fine with all my programs and without any interruptions - I just leave it on in the background to do its thing. I just think its a very good idea - to know that when your in the kitchen grabbing some food, some good is being done at minimum. Enjoy it!

Update 18/12 - Click Online has also suggested two websites you can visit that give free food and services to those who need it, just by visiting their pages. The first one is www.stopthehunger.com and a whole collection of them are on here: www.thehungersite.com

Read more: http://bphelmet.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!75FE152C300ACC6!844.entry