Putting wasted PC power to work in climate fight

Progress Thru Processors is an Intel Facebook app for volunteer distributed computing, donating idle CPU cycles to ClimatePrediction.net, Rosetta@home, and Africa@home, accelerating climate modeling, protein research, and malaria strategies without impacting performance.

A new Facebook application launched computing giant Intel lets idling computers work on a range of health and environmental research projects, including the world's largest climate forecasting project.

Progress Thru Processors, available exclusively through Facebook, which has faced environmental pressure in its energy sourcing, offers up spare computing cycles to three projects: ClimatePrediction.net, a website research project to track and predict changes to the Earth's climate; Rosetta@home, dedicated to finding medical cures for cancer and other diseases; and Africa@home, which is focused on developing strategies to combat malaria in Africa.

"In the same spirit as Intel's Small Things Challenge, Progress Thru Processors underscores our belief that small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world," Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of its Corporate Marketing Group, said in a statement, noting parallels with Google's sustainability efforts across large-scale infrastructure. "By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place."

This type of distributed computing project focuses on using the computing power that otherwise would be wasted by computers left on at the office or home to help speed the process of performing complex calculations, complementing Thermal Zone Mapping efforts in data center efficiency as well. Examples of other massive distributed computing projects include Folding@Home, currently the world's largest such project, which simulates complex protein folding and molecular dynamics; and SETI@Home, a project to help search vast quantities of space to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Intel's Progress Thru Processors project runs in the background when a computer is not being fully utilized, and the company designed the program to not affect performance or any other tasks, while innovations like Frozen Tundra cooling technologies improve data center efficiency.

Sign up for Progress Thru Processors at Facebook.com/ProgressThruProcessors, and learn about Facebook's green shift in its infrastructure as well.

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