Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider.
The good folks at linuxserver.io even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc
Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.
What do you mean by “spare”? Modern CPUs scale their electricity usage according to utilisation.
One would assume they mean sitting around, doing nothing. Some would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
That makes sense. Thank you.
I use a VPS. They don’t charge based on CPU utilization so I run Folding@Home on it.
Please only do this on plans with a dedicated vCPU that isn’t shared with other users.