Use your CPU power for, Humanity

Got the best processor in the world? Racing for better clock speeds than your friend? Having an Intel Core i7 for just basic computing and gaming? Tell me one thing, how many of you fully utilize all the processing power of your processor? Be it browsing internet, gaming or graphics/video editing, none of us use the whole CPU power that comes packed with the mighty cores of today. And to add to that, majority of people don’t even know that their processors can help humanity!

Here is how you can help people and researchers just by doing nothing and letting your computer do some calculations.

ROSETTA@HOME is a grid computing project carried out by David Baker, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. This project aims at solving the most complex problems of molecular biology, the “protein folding” problem. And YOU can help in this project just by giving some part of your processor that will do some protein folding calculations and send it back to the server. In this way, with the help of distributed grid computing, ROSETTA@HOME project is trying to help humanity.

Below is a video that will help you to understand this project better.

It needs a computation client called BOINC. It is available for download at the Rosetta website. After installing, while you’re browsing the internet, playing games, or just doing nothing, your computer and ultimately, YOU will be helping humanity in a techie way 🙂

I carried out this project as the member of Team Chip and got my certificate:

My Contribution : I’ve been in the Rosetta project since May 2009 with the computer magazine team, CHIP. All of us at CHIP used to fold and compete against each other for more and more points.

The Certificate : You can download the signed certificate from the Rosetta website anytime you want, and the current credentials of yours will be printed on the certificate.

Caution : The only problem I faced while running the computations is of overheating due to the processor usage. This is not an issue anymore and can be dealt with downloading a utility program that limits CPU usage.

HAPPY HELPING HUMANITY 😀

[Editor’s Note: This is a post written by our Guest Blogger Rishabh Agarwal. He is an engineer by profession and web designer by choice along with being a Linux enthusiast.

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