How To Get Involved in Distributive Computing

Einstein@Home is a distributive computing program
that looks for gravitational waves.

Today in my digital civilization class we talked about distributive computing.  The basic idea behind this is that most computers are wasting a lot of computing power.  When your computer is running, it performs cycles.  A cycle is when a computer gets (or is given) a task to do and then does it.  This is also known as a fetch-execute cycle.  When you are not using your computer, your computer has lots of empty cycles, in other words, it is doing nothing.  Instead of wasting your computer's ability to compute, I will explain to you some simple ways you can donate your spare computing power.

New Learning Tools

I met with my group today and we discussed  our three different digital literacy labs.

• Rhett taught us about Data Organization Tools like Mind-Meister and Bubbl.us 
• Brian taught us about IP Telephony like Skype
• I taught my group about RSS Feeds and Feed Readers such as Google Reader

It was fun because as we were teaching each other we also discovered some new things.  For example, as Brian was teaching us about all the sweet things that Skype can do like phone conferencing and screen sharing, we decided to try out Google Chat 's new form of IP telephony.  We called ourselves and heard ourselves on Rhett's laptop.  How cool is that?!

From Rhett I learned about some cool organization tools and he pointed out to me that Mind-Meister ISN'T free!  Sad!  I am a lowly college student, I can't pay for online services.  So, Rhett directed us to a free version of mind mapping software.  Bubbl.us !  I tried it; I like it, so I have embedded in this post a mind map that I created.  It is an overview of what I learned today from my classmates.  Enjoy!