Tech Forum

I read in some blog that the reported number of
clerks office computers are something like 12,000.

From what I've seen in most clerks offices is that
computers are left on during church, a lot of that
time running a screensaver. Letting their really
fast processors idle away doing nothing productive.

To which I tell the computers - Cease to be idle !

There are quite a number of distributed computing
projects that have their own screensavers that
actually work on solving a portion of a really big
puzzle. Whether it is breaking encryption for prize
money, trying to find the right medicine to solve
various diseases, or even searching for extra-terrastrial
life.

With 12,000 computers, the church has an opportunity
to contribute to one of these projects in an unique way.
Most of these places release their code, so the results
of these industrious screensavers could be modified so
that it uses MLS to send/recieve.

Just imagine this news story:
"Today, scientists were able to find a cure for the SARS virus thanks
to the help of a Mormon super-computer of sorts..."

Just another crazy idea from

- Atticus Ewig

Aren't most of the ward clerk computers running on POTS modems? I haven't been a clerk for a couple years so I'm not sure what the current status is, but I imagine that most are not hooked up to broadband..

Boy that is quite the idea. How about, instead of the ward computers, we figure out a way to get tech-savy members to do this on their own computers? This would be a community project where people share with others how to enlist their computer securely to one of these projects.

Tom

There are certainly worthy projects out there that can be contributed to, but are there any church projects that could use the CPU power?

At this time I don't think that any projects at the Church have been developed with that in mind.

Tom

Maybe something for the Family History part. Massive indexing of potential resources.

For projects external of the church, I highly recommend enrolling at http://www.grid.org. It works on medial problems trying to identify drugs that will bind to specific proteins (or something like that - medicine isn't my thing.) I started off on dealing with a cure for Anthrax, then Smallpox and now working on cancer.

The UD program has never given me a single bit of trouble. It salvages all the otherwise idle time of my CPU and yet has never slowed me down. I've got a number of CPU years on their projects and quite content to continue on.

Enjoy!

I am a ward clerk in Virginia and the computers we use for MLS use dial up modems for connecting only to church headquarters.

Grid computing is exciting technology the church could easily use. Several years ago, BYU Magazine had a great article on their supercomputer used for medical research, graphic design, animation, etc. Why couldn't BYU team up with the Church office building with its hundreds of computers and members through the world and create a grid computer system that would really have some computational power. I would be willing to comtribute some computer cycle time to research projects associated with the church and its institutions. The results would be fantastic

Hey Tomw,
How much cooperations is there between the church's IT department and BYU's IT department? It seems that both could benefit from mutual coorperation on projects, etc.