Help Me Cure AIDS

Today’s blog post is going to be wildly different from my usual mix of sarcasm, humor, and banal observation. I’m totally serious, and I genuinely want you (whoever you are) to do this.

I want you to help me cure AIDS. Don’t worry. It won’t be hard.

[Note: if you don’t give a crap about AIDS, do this anyway. I’ll explain later how you can help me cure cancer instead.]

All I want you to do is install a program on your computer. It won’t do much if you’re using the computer yourself. However, if you walk away from the computer (leaving it on), or only use the computer for very simple tasks, your computer will begin doing complex calculations on molecular modeling simulations in an effort to cure AIDS.

[Note: skip this paragraph if you are not interested in any more detail than that, or if you are easily frightened by technical talk.] If you follow obscure topics in the news, you may already be aware that researchers faced with extremely complicated problems often have trouble getting time to work with the supercomputers that they need to do their jobs. As a result, calculations modeling these complex systems largely sit stagnant, even though people have a pretty good idea how to solve them. This is simply because the researcher cannot get access to a machine capable of doing the job in less than a century. The ironic thing is that in developed nations, computational power is HUGELY underutilized. Most computer owners only use about 15% of the processing power of their computers (on average – there are spikes, especially if you like modern computer games). For example, if all you’re doing on your PC right now is reading this blog, your CPU is probably using about 1% of its actual processing power. It’s like a jet engine on a go-cart. Serious overkill. I’m asking you to donate about 60% of that unused processing power to help cure AIDS. The program I want you to run turns your computer into a “part” of a simulated supercomputer being managed by a remote server. Your computer will chug away at a small slice of a much larger problem downloaded from the internet. It will then send the answer back to the server, download a new small slice, and repeat. Over time, these solutions are assembled into final results.

The following program does ALL of the work. It runs in the background, using your processor and memory only when you’re not using them yourself. Unless you’re curious what your PC has been up to while you weren’t using it, you can simply set up the program and never look at it again, all while still having a serious impact on understanding and curing AIDS. [Note: If you ARE interested, you can see what you’ve been working on, how much you’ve contributed, and much more.]

I’m not joking when I say that you can make a big difference here. I’ve been using this program for about a week now. On average, about 75 computers have been logged on at any given moment since I joined the system. Two of those computers are mine. That means I’m personally donating more than 2% of the network. (Possibly more, since both my computers have dual core CPU’s, which makes a BIG difference here. If you have a quad core CPU, you’d be able to do 4x the work as a guy with a single core, for example.) If I can talk ten readers into installing this on their computers, I will have increased the size of the network by about 13%. That’s a big jump in speed and efficiency! I’m more than happy to take the time to write this for the possibility of that kind of result.

It’s very simple to get this running. All you need to do is register a username, download the program, click a few checkboxes to let it know what you’re willing to let your computer research, and go. That’s it.

If you want to start with the official page to get to know the process in an “official” capacity first, go here:
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/
read all you want, and follow a couple of obvious links to the download page.

If you just trust me or don’t care, get right to the registering here:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do

Note that curing AIDS is not the only thing your computer can work on. By default, your computer would be set up to research AIDS, cancer, novel drugs, and other biological processes. If AIDS is your only big interest, uncheck the other boxes. If you have a strong interest in cancer research, just check that one. If you just like being helpful and/or have no particular interest in any health problems, check all the boxes. You’re helping the world in a big way no matter what projects you pick.

Also note that you can help even more by forwarding links to this post (or just the included links themselves) to friends and family. I generally don’t care how many people look at the stuff I write. I do my stuff for me, believe it or not. But in this case, preaching to a crowd is EXACTLY what I set out to do. Help me make a difference!