So much for a retrospective.

So I had totally planned on writing a little retrospective piece on the music and movies that amused me during November, but it's a little too late for that. I promise I'll make a best of 2010 list at the end of this year though! I was going to list a few potential candidates today, but I think I'll save the surprises for later.

ANYWAY, I am instead going to write about something completely unrelated! Today's topic: World Community Grid. WCG is a community based public computing grid designed to tackle large scale scientific research. The software was designed by the University of California in Berkeley, and the hardware is run by IBM. Basically, the software will download a small workload for your personal computer, carry out complex mathematical calculations, and send it back upon completion. The projects include anything from cancer and AIDS research, to clean energy and inoculation research. By taking computing tasks and breaking it down into thousands of small workloads to be completed by anyone's computer, the research is done more quickly and significantly more cost efficiently than research centres having to purchase supercomputers for that purpose. Best of all, you can set the software to only run processes during idle times when you aren't using your computer anyway! This way, you can prevent any performance loss if you plan on doing some gaming/editing/etc. Everyone wins! I highly suggest that anyone with a decent computer reads into this whole project a little bit (and maybe even signs up?) by clicking right here.