12 Worthy Causes Seek Your Spare PC Cycles

You can contribute to a variety of scientific research and charities by donating your system's idle processing power to operate an on-the-fly supercomputer.

So you'd like to do more volunteering but can't find the time? Here's an easy way to do it: Donate the spare processing power on your computer via one of the dozens of ongoing volunteer computing projects, many based on open source software called BOINC. You know, like SETI@home, the well-documented project that uses otherwise idle computing cycles to help "search for extraterrestrial intelligence."

Here's a look at 12 cool projects, with thanks to volunteer computing enthusiast Jonathan Brier and UC Berkeley's David Anderson for their insights. The Web sites for the various projects typically include stats on how much processing power they're using, who is volunteering their processors, and so on.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/171126/12_worthy_causes_seek_your_spare_pc_cycles.html

I'm gonna do the earthquake one.

never trust people in my computer. Just because we trust the people in the oval office today, doesn't mean I always will. I worry this is giving someone a copy of my front door key

probably can already backdoor whatever they want.

The only way to make a computer secure is by NOT connecting to the outside world.
But then I don't keep anything on my computer that I don't want anyone to know about.

That kind of precludes me from taking up any of the others--one such project would merely cannibalize the processing time used by another.

One possible exception MIGHT be the earthquake one, but I'm concerned about false readings if I should pick my computer up and move it.