grid computing wooo
I joined… the Dinosaur Comics distributed computing team! We’re a team on a so-called computing grid, which uses volunteer’s idle CPU cycles to perform calculations and modelling which is used for medical research. It might be an exaggeration to say we’re curing cancer, but that’s the basic idea. I believe most of these things are interested in interactions between proteins, which is what your computer models for them. On the Dinosaur Comics team we are currently pulling in over a year of CPU time PER DAY! PRETTY AWESOME. This house is now contributing 8 cores to the project.
But the real excitement is in the membership drive Ryan North has been campaigning on Qwantz. We’re in 7th place when ranked by the total number of members. Yesterday we demolished the dastardly L’Alliance Francophone and have just this very evening surpassed the team of Slashdot. We’re 240 members short of the next biggest team, but still growing. WATCH OUT IBM, 6th place shall be ours presently.
