Intel Puts Wasted PC Power to Work on Climate Fight

Published August 05, 2009

A new Facebook application launched computing giant Intel lets idling computers work on a range of health and environmental research projects, including the world's largest climate forecasting project.

Progress Thru Processors, available exclusively through Facebook, offers up spare computing cycles to three projects: ClimatePrediction.net, a website research project to track and predict changes to the Earth's climate; Rosetta@home, dedicated to finding medical cures for cancer and other diseases; and Africa@home, which is focused on developing strategies to combat malaria in Africa.

"In the same spirit as Intel's Small Things Challenge, Progress Thru Processors underscores our belief that small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world," Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of its Corporate Marketing Group, said in a statement. "By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place."

This type of distributed computing project focuses on using the computing power that otherwise would be wasted by computers left on at the office or home to help speed the process of performing complex calculations. Examples of other massive distributed computing projects include Folding@Home, currently the world's largest such project, which simulates complex protein folding and molecular dynamics; and SETI@Home, a project to help search vast quantities of space to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Intel's Progress Thru Processors project runs in the background when a computer is not being fully utilized, and the company designed the program to not affect performance or any other tasks.

Sign up for Progress Thru Processors at Facebook.com/ProgressThruProcessors.

Intel taking credit for BOINC? :rolleyes:

Anonymous, August 7, 2009 - 20:04

Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home and Africa@home are nothing new. They're perfectly good distributed computing projects, but NOT new.

But there ARE three new things here:
- these BOINC projects are being pushed on facebook as if they were novel
- they're being greenwashed like crazy
- Intel is squeezing them for public relations brownie points.

Sweet, but my processor now runs at 100%

Anonymous, August 7, 2009 - 06:13

At 100%, my computer consumes 164 watts instead of 50 watts. For a business of let say 50 computers, this could increased the electricity bill used by computer by 3 times.

100 watts = 0.1 Kw
1 KwH = 10 cents

Let say a 40 hours week.

So let say it's 40 cents per computer per week.
0.40 x 50 = 20$ per week
20$ x 50 weeks = 1000$ per year difference on the electricity bill.

Awesome - But Overloaded Site?

Anonymous, August 6, 2009 - 08:08

These tools are a great idea! Have had difficulties accessing through Safari and Firefox though. How about others?

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Intel Puts Wasted PC Power to Work on Climate Fight

Intel taking credit for BOINC? :rolleyes:

Sweet, but my processor now runs at 100%

Awesome - But Overloaded Site?

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