Your dusty old PC may hold the cure for cancer

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Peter7

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http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/06/05/research.at.home.ap/index.html

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- Researcher David Baker believes the key to an AIDS vaccine or a cure for cancer may be that old PC sitting under a layer of dust in your closet or the one on your desk doing little else but running a screen saver.
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Using software made popular in a massive yet so far fruitless search for intelligent life beyond Earth, he and his research team are tapping the computing power of tens of thousands of PCs whose owners are donating spare computer time to chop away at scientific problems over the Internet.
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hmmm... maybe the SETI distro. folks should rather change their softare to something closer to home. ;)

Anybody know how much traffic these things consume? Especially in a post Nov 1st 2005 capped South Africa.

Edit: Here's the link for the Rosetta@home project: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
 
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Already running World Community Grid on one machine (for the free easynews gigs;)) but I should be able to fit this one on somewhere. :D
 
Not much at all if I remember correctly. Seti@home was popular back in 28.8 days
 
I'd rather use this one to help with cancer research than the Seti one, am busy downloading it now.
 
Looks a bit heavy on one's machine - warnings of disk thrashing and processor overheating. Think I'll give it a miss.
 
rwenzori : Running it on my Mac Mini whilst using iTunes and Web Browsing. No noticable difference in performance
 
just downloaded and installed it now :D
initial setup totals around 20mb, then its +-1mb per data file (which takes 7hours to compute on my sempron 2800)
not sure how much it uploads, but its worth it if it helps save my life one day ;)
 
rwenzori said:
Looks a bit heavy on one's machine - warnings of disk thrashing and processor overheating. Think I'll give it a miss.
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That would only happen if you got a Intel P4 CPU and only 256mb of ram.

P4's overheat when you use them. Period.
WinXP needs 512mb ram to run properly anyway.

I'm sticking with SETI. If we find ET out there, much more money will go into medical research. like what happen in the first space race. What we learned about the human cardiovascular system during those years, has greatly improved medical science.

Feel free to do what you thing is right. I believe in investing in long term goals.

Wouldn't it be great if governments stop bickering over a few drops of oil in the sand and start focusing on something really important. reducing our dependancy on our small little world and expanding into the solar system.

Come on everyone get your old PC's out and get them working on something meaningfull.
 
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