Many of us have experienced cancer's wrath visited upon a family member or friend.  Treatment methods are improving but cancer still kills.  There are some well-known ways for all of us to participate in treatment and finding cures.  We can donate money, spend time in fundraising activities and we can let our PCs help with research at no cost!

Modern computers are much faster than the speediest typist or mouse clicker.  This means that your computer is sitting idle about 90% of the time (nine-tenths of each second).  There is a way to use this idle processor time to perform tasks in the background without affecting normal computing.

Your Personal Supercomputer

The Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project uses our idle computer processor cycles to make calculations on outcomes of different chemical combinations on specific proteins (and other tests in the future). The goal of the project is to advance research on curing cancer by combining the power of thousands of PCs all working in the background to crunch data.  Problems and completed solutions are downloaded and uploaded when you connect to the internet.

After you download a client application your computer will be analyzing molecules in no time with no work on your part. Though there are only Windows clients right now, Unix and Mac versions should appear in the future. 

Digital Age Philanthropy

If  your computer discovers the cancer cure, who gets rich?  Oxford University will patent it and sell the rights to produce it.  When the patent expires, the world will be able to afford cancer cures - many will die before that happens.

So why participate?  If we do, we might have affordable cures sooner.  If we don't, 20 years from now we might wish we had.  No matter who gets the money, we all might prosper with better treatment in the future.

Click on Univa UD and read the information carefully.

-- David Jackson