“The neural network simulator is an application that simulates neurons. Each downloaded work unit generates 500,000 biophysical neurons. Because the simulator is in an initial phase and we have very few cellular models implemented, we can only use it to test for simulations capacity. We have completed the first phase of the project, to simulate over 100 billion neurons. The second largest brain simulation has been done on a cluster of 27 machines, with 100 billion neurons simulated over a period of 50 days. While it was a very interesting experiment which pushed the frontier further on it was a partial simulation only, in the sense that many of the required components were not implemented due to hardware constraints.”

For example ClimatePrediction.Net has a results page where the produced climate prediction maps are published. In one case they wrote: “his means that the amount of sulphate in the atmosphere is related to the amount of SO2 emissions, but also to the availability of these other molecules, the number of cloud droplets in the air etc.”

It’s actually pretty interesting to go through these websites and read through the results of the processing tasks.

What impresses me about that particular project is that they’ve developed multiple clients for different platforms. The version of the client that I use is actually designed to use the GPU on my graphics card, rather than the CPU. Anyone with an 8000 or 9000 series nVidia card (I’ve got an 8800GT) can use that particular client as the cards are designed for projects such as these.

I like to know that the money I’ve forked out for my hardware can be put to good use!

Ryan and everyone else I recommend you take a look at GridRepublic http://www.gridrepublic.org which is a nonprofit working in collaboration with BOINC to make it easy for the mainstream to get started with volunteer computing. They bring together the BOINC projects into one site where it is easy to join, discover, and control multiple projects and computers all from a single login.