(Participation in this project is FREE. It makes use of unallocated resources within your PC and causes no detectable degradation of performance.)

One in four of us will at some time suffer from cancer. The high mortality rate, the suffering experienced by patients from the side effects of existing treatments, and the high costs of treatment all contribute to making cancer a priority for drug research.

By joining the United Devices network, you can have a direct benefit to cancer research. The UD software sits in the background on your PC and utilises any spare capacity to analyse data for cancer research projects. (It can also be set just to run when your computer is idle if you are concerned about your PC performance being compromised, but, in reality, there is very little overhaead and even running live you should see no degradation.)

Each individual computer analyzes a few molecules and then sends the results back over the Internet for further research. This project is anticipated to be the largest computational chemistry project ever undertaken and represents a genuine hope to find a better way to fight cancer. (You can also choose to work on anthrax or smallpox.)




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The link to the site is http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/

Downloading the agent takes only a few minutes and once it is done it will function quite happily on its own. You can make adjustments to how and when it runs very easily. There is a very comprehensive FAQ section to help.

I have set up a MoneyAM BBers team so that we can pool our work and statistics. Why not join in and see how much of a difference MoneyAM can make?

The link to our team is MoneyAM Users Team - JOIN NOW
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Join us today and make a difference while you make money. One day you might be grateful to take advantage of the developments this research achieves.

Don't just make a donation, make a difference!

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PS Thanks to MegaBucks who suggested the idea of starting here.

Compute Against Cancer is run by Paragon on a profit basis. They have paying and non-paying users of the grid, and a portion of the revenue of the paying users is given to the non-paying users after Paragon take their cut. Paying projects are prioritised on the grid. Sounds a little commercial for my liking.

With the IBM World Community Grid, there is a choice of projects including cancer (although the cancer offering is a little uninspiring) and it is not run for profit, in fact IBM donate hardware, software and expertise to it, and users of the facility must be public bodies or non-profit organisations. It has around 600K PCs on the grid. It uses the same software as grid.org and can only use one processor as grid.org did. However we're all familiar with the interface.

Folding@Home is run by Stanford University and is also a strong candidate. They have around 200K PCs. There are again a number of disease-based research projects, but I can't see that it is possible to select what projects you run. It is possible to run two copies on dual processor systems. The interface looks a little techy if you plan on running on anything other than the default parameters.

Not sure that the UK issue really applies with any of the grids. I have the feeling that UK researchers apply for time on the grids along with other nations.

I would edge towards running Folding@home.