Donate Your Computing Power, Cure Cancer for Free

From cancer research to findings alien life, your computer can benefit humanity.

ByABC News

July 11, 2008, 5:41 PM

July 13, 2008 -- Most of us have been touched in some way by diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Seemingly daily, there's more grim news about food shortages and climate change. But you can help make a difference and it doesn't cost your time or money.

Your home computer does the work. The idea is genius. When a problem is too complex for one computer to solve it in a timely manner, pieces are delved out among many computers. Each computer solves its portion of the problem. Then, results are sent back to a main server. This is called distributed computing.

Typically, distributed computing programs work as a screen saver, so they run when the computer is idle. To join a distributed computing project, you download a program. The program connects to a server to receive tasks and return data.

Distributed computing projects don't require particularly powerful computers. If yours was purchased in the past three or four years, it will probably work. You do need an Internet connection. But speed isn't important; many projects work with dial-up.

Here are a few popular projects to get you started. You will find links to these at www.komando.com/news.

Folding@home is run by the Pande Group, a lab that's part of Stanford University's departments of chemistry and structural biology and Stanford's medical center. Folding@home's goal is to understand why proteins "misfold." Protein misfolding can lead to diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer and mad cow.

It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console.

The Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington runs Rosetta@home. Like Folding@home, Rosetta@home studies proteins. The project may lead to cures for AIDS, cancer and malaria, among other things.

Rosetta@home runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

IBM sponsors the World Community Grid. It aims to create the world's largest public computing grid. It makes the resources available to nonprofit projects that benefit humanity.