Google Compute
 

For those of who benefit from the benevolence of Google, here's a chance to give something back.

Go to http://labs.google.com/ to enable your toolbar to use spare cpu cycles to crunch (or fold) proteins.

I expect to see interesting stuff come out of this soon.

I met the Google person who's responsible for toolbar development just few weeks ago, and was asking him why they're not using it for distributing computing (although my suggestion was information retrieval related). Haa, neat.

I wont do it but the concept is solid could really help research relating to supercomputers when they dont have them

It's pretty harmless if you cap the max usage at 40%-- if you're doing something that needs your whole processor you probably don't want IE of all things open. If you're worried about security, I'd worry about MS backdoors (NSA key), MS exploits, and the long lived Google cookie coupled with the problem that Google can be required to testify against you... none of which has anything to do with folding proteins, etc.

I´d do if they´d pay like 2$ per gigaflop ...

I've been running Folding@Home for quite a long time actually... :winkwink:

been thinking about setting up some machines for folding and that star search thing. got some older computers that i could run that on and not hurt anything. all it needs in internet access and like win98, right?

I save my idle time for Seti

Anything that can run IE 5.. even 95 would work.

Verifying the Drake Equation is worthy. I wish they were scanning from a little further out.

I'd like to see Google Compute take off because it will pave the way for Google to implement distributed client side heuristics. Since this thing is 100% optional, I think it will give them a sense
of whether or not that's something to try.