Intel Making Progress Through Processors
If I had to choose one reason why I like working at Intel, it wouldn’t be because I have a company issued Mac, or the fact that I get to go to CES every year and not have booth duty. Heck, it’s not even that I get to interview celebrities in Hollywood. The one reason is pretty simple; it’s the little things that Intel does to help humanity.
Today, we have officially launched Progress Thru Processors; a new Facebook application that uses idle PC processor power for projects that are geared toward life changing research such as finding cures for deadly diseases and combating climate change.
The goal of this project is to bring about positive change by combining the power of social networking on Facebook with the life changing promise of what is called volunteer computing. Volunteer computing is an arrangement in which people (volunteers) provide computing resources to public interest research projects.
Examples of volunteer computing include:
Rosetta@home - This project is focused on determining the 3-dimensional shape of proteins as part of research that may ultimately contribute to cures for major human diseases such as AIDS / HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Climateprediction.net - This project is computing a massive environmental model intended to forecast climate conditions in the 21st century. Climate change, and our response to it, is an issue of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else.
Africa@Home - The goal of this project is to use volunteer distributed computing to provide computing resources to African universities and institutions. The first such project is MalariaControl.net, a project to determine optimal strategies for controlling the spread of Malaria.
Facebook users can easily install the app and immediately begin contributing their computer processor’s idle power to one of three very worthy projects.
I have been using the application for over a week now. It’s truly amazing that I can give back to something very important to many people, myself included, by simply installing an application on my computer. I hope you will join me.
You can install the app here become a fan here and/or you can follow us on twitter and get up to date info on what’s going on behind the scenes at 2200 Mission College Blvd.
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Comments
Aug 03 | Toadster said:
Michael - this is SO cool! I've been a part of the grid computing society since 2002 - it's a great way to give some much needed compute time to the global community. Very excited to be a part of this!
Aug 10 | malcolm said:
this is awesome that you are doing this. If every company spent less than 10% of their marketing for a cause, this world would be in such a better place.