This is kinda cool.
Was lookin around. I always amazes me what folks think up to put computers in. I especially like the Commador 64 rebuild.
New mini "Super parallel" computer.
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Mobius
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The common distributed computing initiatives (Folding and SETI) are like many research projects: They appear useless until they produce results.
SETI is only slightly more likely to turn up alien signals as a Sioux Indian trying to pick up Telegraph signals by looking for smoke signals on the horizon. I often wonder why I've devoted over 40,000 hours to SETI, but the chance is non-zero, so I give my spare cycles to that chance.
Folding is undoubtedly more likely to crack a few whoppers, and benefit mankind in some way I think.
SETI is only slightly more likely to turn up alien signals as a Sioux Indian trying to pick up Telegraph signals by looking for smoke signals on the horizon. I often wonder why I've devoted over 40,000 hours to SETI, but the chance is non-zero, so I give my spare cycles to that chance.
Folding is undoubtedly more likely to crack a few whoppers, and benefit mankind in some way I think.
Well, I look at it this way:
The laws that govern complex molecules such as proteins are so complicated that it is still impossible to simulate them on supercomputers.
Yet, on a distributed system, you don't need simulation software, you get a "data unit" which weighs in at a few kilobytes, and your computer spends hours crunching it!
I find it hard to believe that unit contains an actual part of a molecule simulation with just a few kilobytes in size, an can keep a GHz+ computer busy for so long...
Same with SETI... I'd have to research what exactly they have the computers calculate.
If it was a project to search for prime numbers, I'd be interested because however useless or useful it is to find a new prime number, I would know what my PC is doing.
The laws that govern complex molecules such as proteins are so complicated that it is still impossible to simulate them on supercomputers.
Yet, on a distributed system, you don't need simulation software, you get a "data unit" which weighs in at a few kilobytes, and your computer spends hours crunching it!
I find it hard to believe that unit contains an actual part of a molecule simulation with just a few kilobytes in size, an can keep a GHz+ computer busy for so long...
Same with SETI... I'd have to research what exactly they have the computers calculate.
If it was a project to search for prime numbers, I'd be interested because however useless or useful it is to find a new prime number, I would know what my PC is doing.
It's called Prime95 and I believe it predates SETI and folding:Tricord wrote:Well, I look at it this way:
If it was a project to search for prime numbers, I'd be interested because however useless or useful it is to find a new prime number, I would know what my PC is doing.
http://www.mersenne.org