I'm sure many of you have heard about the Seti@Home

program, developed to leverage the power of thousands of home computers to

process radio signals in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It does

so by downloading chunks of data that gets processed by a screen saver and then

later the results are uploaded back to the main server. Interesting for sure!

Recently I ran across the The

Intel® Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program, a site built to host programs

similar to Seti@Home but devoted to life science

programs targeting specific diseases. Right now the site is hosting several

programs including The United

Devices Cancer Research Program, The

Stanford Alzheimer and Amyloidogenic Disease Research Program, and The

Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute Distributed Folding Program. There

was a fourth program, The United

Devices Anthrax Research Program which has already been completed - take a

look at the results,

they screened down from more than 3.5 billion possible molecules to about

300,000 in less than four weeks! Seems pretty cool to me.

So why not participate? I've signed up for The

Stanford Alzheimer and Amyloidogenic Disease Research Program and downloaded

the screensaver, about 2m worth. No problems installing and has run fine so

far. The best part is that you can participate in teams! When you first install

(or right click on the screensaver and select configure) you can enter a team id

- I've set one up for SQLServerCentral - it's 2197. You can view the results by

visiting the team

stats page. On average it takes 1-2 days to process a "work unit"

and upload the results, so it'll be a couple days before the stats really show

anything.

It's for a good cause and doesn't cost anything, what could be better? I'm

hoping you'll give it a try. If you do, please just post a quick note in the

attached discussion forum so we can see how we're doing!