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.
I have a spare room in my house sat idle 80% of the time. I could easily install a few racks of servers in there and have some gigaflops of computing power to contribute.
But actually, being “idle” isn’t the same thing as “spare” because it would cost a lot of money to install racks of servers, just as it costs money to run computations on an otherwise idle computer.
So I mean no, but no. It’s only spare capacity in a stupid, convoluted way that’s disconnected from common sense and common usage of the word.
But you managed to brag about having hundreds of gigaflops of taxpayer-funded computing at your fingertips so good for you, you go for that validation from strangers on the Internet.