Put your computer to good use while left on overnight

In a lot of cases, organisations leave their computers on overnight to help keep the network stable, to apply security updates and to do their daily virus scans and clean themselves up.

When coming up with ideas for my 3rd year dissertation at university, I thought of the idea of distributed computing - to allow lots of computers to participate in a mathematically complex series of events, to help crack codes or to help science with anything that requires more computing power than is currently available.

On heading into one of the labs, I saw a little satellite dish icon in the taskbar. I found it was a program which ran something called SETI@Home, which downloads satellite signals and processes them from any communication from outer space!

If you would like to put your computer to good helpful use overnight, have a look at the plethorea of applications to run at

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure Networked Computing)

Investigations include:

• Calculating high prime numbers (to assist encryptions)
• Protein folding (to research cancer)
• Radio wave analysis (to research E.T)
• Gravitational analysis (to research pulsars)
• Climate Prediction

Plus many many more! Check it out.