this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects

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 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) 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 5 points 1 week ago

Based confession