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Up Front: Give Your Unused Cycles to Science

Say so long to screen savers and use your CPU's idle power for some worthwhile work.

Kevin McKean

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Put Your Idle PC to Work

Your PC can help fight cancer and solve other big problems, through the numerous distributed computing projects currently running. Why not join in? Working together makes solving problems easier. That's why we have set up the PC World Fighting Cancer team on the Intel/United Devices Cancer Research Project. This project aims to use the spare processing power of PCs to find new drugs for fighting leukemia.

To join the PC World Fighting Cancer team, first download the United Devices agent software. It is available from Intel or directly from United Devices.

Once you have downloaded the software, run it to install the agent on your PC and then set up a user name and password. Your user name helps United Devices keep track of how many work units your PC has completed.

When you are all signed up and ready, go to this page, sign in with your United Devices user name and password, and then click on Join This Team to join the PC World team. You can also use this page to keep track of how the team is performing and how many work units your system has processed.

If you don't want to join this project, there are plenty of other worthy causes that you can contribute your computer's spare processing power to. Here is an alphabetical list of a few of the projects currently running, and what their aims are.

  • Distributed.net: Testing different types of encryption by trying to decrypt messages

  • Entropia: Various projects, including finding a cure for AIDS and predicting the stock market

  • Folding@home: Solving how proteins are manufactured

  • Genome@home: Creating new proteins and genes that may lead to new cures for diseases

  • GIMPS: Trying to find the next largest prime number

  • Golem@home: Testing new robot designs by creating computer-generated robots that evolve

  • Popular Power: Testing new flu vaccines to find a cure

  • SETI@home: Searching for signs of life in outer space

--Richard Baguley

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