Donating Your Unused CPU Cycles to a Good Cause

Modern computers are fast. Really fast! When we tell them to do something, we still have to wait for them to complete the task, but most of the time your CPU is just sitting there, waiting for you to give it another task to perform. During this time the CPU is still performing billions of cycles per second, but it's just running zeroes through itself while it waits for some actual work to do.

With hundreds of millions of computers in the world sitting idle most of the time, their unused processing power is almost unimaginable, and is probably greater than all of the supercomputers in the world combined! Rather than let your spare CPU cycles go to waste, everyone should consider donating their unused processing power to a distributed computing project.

Distributed computing projects take a very large task and break it into pieces, then assign those pieces to participating computers around the world. This allows important scientific and mathematical projects to have access to a supercomputer without having to pay millions of dollars to actually purchase or rent processing time on one. If everyone were to participate in a distributed computing project, the benefits to humanity and the Earth would be so incredible that participation should almost be required by law. I hope that future operating systems will ask users to select one during the installation or activation process.

Some distributed computing projects are open-ended, like the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which scans radio frequencies for messages from space that may or may not exist. Another popular open-ended project is Folding@home, which performs complex protein folding in the hopes of finding a cure for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's Disease, but the highly parallel nature of that project means that the vast majority of the work is being performed by graphics cards (GPUs) and PlayStation 3 consoles. The average GPU client is averaging more than 70x the performance of current CPU submissions!

Other projects set out to solve a specific problem that would be unsolvable without a supercomputer. I've chosen Seventeen or Bust as my distributed computing project for a number of reasons.

Most importantly, Seventeen or Bust will end someday, and that someday is probably soon! The goal of the project is to determine if 17 specific numbers can be multiplied by 2^n+1 to produce a prime number, which will solve the Sierpinski problem. Five years into the project, 11 of those numbers have led to the discovery of enormous prime numbers. It's impossible to know how much more time will be needed to solve the last 6 numbers, but the more people who participate, the sooner it will be. There's something very satisfying about completing a distributed computing project and achieving a mathematical and scientific victory. If you're lucky enough to find a prime number, you'll get credit for being the discoverer!

It may not seem as important as curing cancer, and I wholehearted support that project, too. Personally, I recommend running Folding@home on a high-end graphics card or PlayStation 3 instead, and you can still run Seventeen or Bust on your CPU. Solving the Sierpinski problem, or any problem, contributes something to our understanding of mathematics and the nature of the universe. I think it's well worth doing, it will be over someday soon, and then you can pick a new project to donate your CPU cycles to. By that time, multi-core CPUs, or CPUs that include highly parallel processors such as Graphics Processing Units or math coprocessors, will likely contribute much more to projects like Folding@home than they currently can. The open-ended projects won't really miss you, and you can get back to them as soon as we solve this problem.

If you choose to join, please consider joining Team Retro to show your support for classic gaming.

I am so convinced of the potential benefits of harnessing the unused processing power of the world's computers that I have started a petition to ask Microsoft, Apple, the Linux Foundation, and any other organization that has input into the future direction of operating systems, to ask users to select a distributed computing project during the installation or activation process. They could recommend a default for users who don't wish to research the choices available to them, poll system hardware to recommend projects that the user's computer would be most useful to, or simply allow the user to opt out or decide at a later date. At least everyone would be forced to think about it, and global participation in distributed computing projects would explode! We could solve the mathematical mysteries of the universe, cure diseases, and maybe even discover life on other planets! Please sign my petition at www.petitiononline.com/distrib/.