Johannesburg (IT News Africa) — COMPUTER manufacturer, Intel Corporation, has announced Progress Thru Processors, a new volunteer computing application that allows people to donate their PCs’ unused processor power to research projects.
Progress Thru Processors participants can choose to contribute excess processor computing power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home, which is currently focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.
“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,”
said Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager, Corporate Marketing Group.
“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”
Intel’s long history supporting volunteer computing projects includes sponsorship of SETI@home as well as Intel’s Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program, which donated computer processing power to cancer research.
For Progress Thru Processors, Intel has teamed with GridRepublic, a not-for-profit volunteer computing organization that seeks to bring together people with spare processing power with worthy projects in need of computing resources.
“The social and scientific utility of volunteer computing is a function of the number of participants – the more people we sign up, the greater the good we can collectively do,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of GridRepublic.
“We’re optimistic that the combination of the Facebook platform and Intel’s global reach will help bring large numbers of new people into volunteer computing, enabling research and discovery which would otherwise be impossible.”
By Mpendulo Ngwenya
