Admittedly, as a third-world country, we have a lot of ground to cover in order to catch up with the technological trends of our first-world counterparts. But we can help usher in new frontiers of science and technology in a different way, through volunteer computing.
Volunteer computing allows computer users to donate unused storage capacity in your computer – basically your computer’s unused processing power and storage capacity – in order to solve a myriad of scientific problems, such as cancer and stem cell research, global warming, even finding life on other planets. What the process does is it allows for the burden of solving these complex problems to be split into smaller, simpler problems and computations which are then worked on by individual computers around the world.
On the average, there are millions of personal computers around the world whose capacities are underutilized. PC owners, more often than not, have more storage space than they actually could consume. The theory behind volunteer computing is that while one single supercomputer will take forever (if at all) in arriving at the desired solution to the world’s problems, the cumulative amount of all the unused processing and storage power may very well be the answer – providing answers to problems a single supercomputer would never have been able to crack, and at a quicker pace, at that. The numbers clearly add up: a typical supercomputer has the power of about 5,000 processors at any single time, but imagine what 300,000 computer processors could do for a cause. That amount is what the Folding@home project has, a program actively studying alternative measures to solving diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer.
Very much like donating your money to charity, computer owners can choose to donate their PC power to any scientific cause that they believe in. All it takes is the download of a special software which allocates and delivers work for your computer, which your computer will then send out to the central server once it has accomplished the task.
The forerunners of this new trend address qualms about computer security (such as susceptibility to viruses) by using digital signatures and encryption technology such as code signing. Trusting the scientists behind the experiments and calculations has been another issue, though I find this rather trivial, in light of the lengths users go to do download media for free on the internet. If we as PC owners can trust a stranger of a peer-to-peer network when he verifies that his data is uncorrupted, how could we doubt programs such as these that have professional and academic backing – and with nobler goals than just scoring a free download no less. In the long run, it remains a PC owner’s job to assess a particular project’s value and trustworthiness. It is, after all, a volunteer program – no one is forcing you to participate unless you are truly on board.
Naturally, participating as a volunteer (or donor) will not be without costs. A zealous participant may want to keep his or her PC on for longer hours in order for it to be able to accomplish more work. Also, another natural consequence would be a decreased PC performance. Looking at the bigger picture, however, I think we can all safely say that the benefits would definitely outweigh the costs. Perhaps, policy could even play a role in promoting participation in these kinds of programs. In streamlining computer activities by apportioning a bulk of its capacity to solving a “nobler” cause, we may just minimize the emerging evils brought on by idle time online.
http://tech.msn.com/guides/green/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4898078
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