I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!
(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of “Folding@home”. Thank you I’ll try it out.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
You’re welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there’s a huge list of such “volunteer computing” projects: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr…
So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!
Now the confession: I’m a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that’s partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn’t really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.
But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I used to do it for SETI@home and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.
Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.
bigboitricky@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Based confession
yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You should check out the great internet mersenne prime search as well: mersenne.org