Donating Spare CPU Cycles to Fold@Home
If, like me, you have various computers or servers which need to be online 24/7 but aren't always using their full CPU power then consider donating your spare CPU power to a collaborative computing project for the greater good of mankind, such as Folding@Home.
Folding@home is a distributed-computing project run by a team at Stanford University who are exploring how proteins fold and unfold in order to carry out their functions within the body. When these proteins fold or unfold incorrectly abnormalities and diseases, such as cancer, may occur. By simulating the folding of various proteins in billions of different ways researchers hope to learn more about such problems and how to rectify them.
The Folding@home client is available for both Windows and Linux, currently supporting single cores with the beta and next version out supporting multiple processing cores. I actually like the single core support as it means that I can have the fold@home process only maxing out one core and the other core left untouched for use by other server processes.
The picture below shows the usage on two different servers, the first being a dual core 3ghz server and the other being a single core 400mhz server. Note that as the process only utilizes IDLE cpu time, it won't battle with other processes for CPU time, it will only use as much CPU power that is not currently needed.
Sign up on the site to create your own username and/or team. The idea being that teams can compete against each other in providing the most cpu work time and users can compete within their teams. If you would like, feel free to join my team 95202.
You will need to judge for yourself but in my opinion it is probably not worth leaving a machine on solely for this purpose as the environmental impact would probably outweigh the benefits. This is of course a great thing to do if you already have servers that need to be online 24/7 but don't make full use of their cpu power.