So I've been doing this World Community Grid for about fifteen years now, off and on, and I thought it might be something some of the Ornery crowd would be into and I should give it a pitch. It's like a charity but instead of money you donate your computing power. I think they worked on the Human Genome Project and that distributed computing helped get it done much more quickly than had been initially anticipated. Now they're working on cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and a bunch of other stuff.
It doesn't seem to use much bandwidth but it does use just about all of the processing power available so I pretty much always turn it off if I'm doing anything more than browsing the internet or playing chess or sudoku, but since I leave my computer on all night and day anyway I just let it run when I'm not using it. Well, my pitch isn't going to be all the persuasive here. I'm just going to point to the website and let y'all decide for yourselves. If you work at an office you might send it up the flagpole there and see if anyone salutes especially for offices where they just leave the computers on all night anyway, but for this program even if they don't maybe they will.
What got me started is I was in speech class in college and had to do a persuasive speech. I was looking around for something to do it on and came across an article on distributed computing and it mentioned the World Community Grid so I did some more research and made that my topic. It was a pretty good speech if I do say so myself, but the subject made it really easy so even if you don't end up doing it if you know any students who have to write a persuasive speech paper this is a good subject to recommend.
