Machine World

I have a new computer. Have for a while. Commissioned a buddy of mine to build it, and it's pretty sweet. Pentium Quad-Core, 2.4Ghz processor, good motherboard, 2 gig of RAM (I'll be expanding that to 8 when I have the money, naturally), NVidia GeForce 8600 Graphics card (which is sweet). So, with a fair amount of power available to my disposal, The first thing I did was kick some alien booty as Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. After crowbarring half of another universe into oblivion, I looked at my computer through the plexiglas door on the case and thought to myself, "What Now?"

All that processing power, all that memory, 500gb of storage space...it's really quite excessive. All I'm going to do with it is download movies and music, an honest waste of such a nice system. So I searched.

SETI@home is a simple program. Download the host program, called BOINC, and then run SETI@home and your computer will start downloading packages of numbers to be crunched, numbers SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) collected in one of their looks at the sky. They need to process MASSIVE amounts of data looking for patterns that could be indicative of an intelligent society. Basically, my computer is looking for an alien society's version of "I Love Lucy". Turns out a lot of overclockers do this too, or other programs you can run through BOINC because it maxes out their system and is a good way of assuring that they can run their processor at such an insane speed.

Wonderful. I'm looking into space, working to solve one of the oldest questions mankind has. Thing is, I'm not much for the philanthropic, more of the misanthropic really. So, how can this benefit me? I searched, and it turns out I could potentially get PAID for those CPU cycles I'm wasting. CPUShare is a project where I register, open a sell order, and eventually somebody connects to it and decides to pay me the amount I decided on when I opened the order per hour for a chunk of my computers. It took a little bit more know-how than simply downloading and installing the BOINC program, but it actually gives you an ISO file and you either burn that to CD and restart your machine with that as the OS or you can create a virtual machine using easily available and free software that will run the program. Problem is, there are more sell orders than there are buy orders, and even though my machine frankly rocks, nobody has connected to me yet.

Eventually, though, somebody will, and while I'll only be paid .02 euros per hour, it's more than nothing, and while I may not know what I'm computing, I'll be getting paid for it and they won't actually have access to my computer itself, only a portion of the CPU and RAM allotted to them.

So all you people who want to render a digital movie and may not have the coolest processor or the most memory? Try CPUShare! They need more buyers!

TRH