I’ve been a long time fan of distributed computing projects. Back in 1999 I started donating spare CPU cycles to the SETI project. I was really just amazed that everyday people could – without much effort – contribute to a science project with the potential to actually make a discovery or solve an important problem.

Ok, so maybe SETI was just a long shot of a chance at making a discovery. But it certainly caught my interest, and since I started I have dedicated many thousands of hours of CPU time at the effort.

Now a days, other projects – possibly more useful in nature – have cropped up. An interesting new project hosted at www.malariacontrol.net has a noble goal: to model a simulation of the transmission dynamics and health effects of malaria. The Swiss Tropical Institute has developed a computer model for malaria epidemiology (the study of factors affecting health and illness of individuals and populations) that required an enormous amount of computing power to ” validate such models and to adequately simulate the full range of interventions and transmission patterns relevant for malaria control in Africa”.

Anyone can help! The actual client program (from malariacontrol) will only operate on a Windows or Linux PC. To get started, you must first download a program called “BOINC” . It allows you to participate in several different distributed projects. Here are some other projects you can contribute to as well that might be interesting:

SETI@home : Search for unusual signals that could be attributed to extra terrestrial life.
Einstein@home: Search through data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors for pulsars.
climateprediction.net: An attempt at producing a forecast of the climate for the 21st century.
rosetta@home: Determine the 3D shape of proteins that may lead to finding cures for some of the major human diseases.

There are other projects, too, to check out. Start at the BOINC website to for more information!