PC philanthropy is sharing some of the unused resources (mainly processor cycles) of your
personal computer to benefit a social cause. For example, during the time that your computer is not
working on applications that you're using, it can be working on some small part of a large-scale
problem in medical research or the search for signals from outer space. Effectively, you and
thousands of other PC users engaged in PC philanthropy become part of a kind of distributed supercomputer that is
doing parallel
processing.
Taking part in PC philanthropy requires that you download a small program from a Web site that
is administering a project. In one example, this program comes with a screensaver included, so that
when your computer is booted up and the screensaver automatically activated, the work program
starts, too. It then uses your computer's processor
cycles only when no other program in your computer is busy.
PC philanthropy is sometimes described as a form of peer-to-peer
computing, in the sense that many Internet users are joined as peers in a common effort. One of the
first PC philanthropy projects was the collective analysis of signals from outer space as part of
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
This was last updated in August 2005
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