The Futures Company

Eleanor Cooksey writes:

With the rise of CSR and increasing interest in pro bono work, I was struck by an article in last week’s Economist which describes the range of projects now available which use spare processing capacity on ordinary PCs. They range from the biggest and best known, SETI@home, which started in 1999 searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, and now has over 3 million contributors, to projects looking for the next prime number. Whilst we are used to the idea of volunteering about ‘doing good’, donating spare PC processing power suggests we could think more laterally about how we can share under-used resources.

What is also interesting is the ever widening pool of those who might volunteer in this way. A growing number of other devices, including games consoles, also contain significant amounts of processing power and are internet enabled. One of the projects, Folding@home, (which looked at protein simulations) became the largest known distributed computing network thanks to its 40,000 plus PlayStation 3 volunteers.