How you can help the LHC and 12 other ways to donate your PC's spare processing power

Contribute to projects including the LHC, climate forecasting, projects that benefit humanity, target disease cures and more

Quake-Catcher Network

This one is different from the other projects in that it's not really exploiting processing power, but rather, built-in accelerometers in laptops as a distributed seismograph. The idea is to provide a better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems and others (a big emphasis of the project is getting K-12 science teachers involved). While desktop systems don't have accelerometers, they can be outfitted with USB-based sensors to partake in the network. The smallest earthquake detected by the network so far measured 3.1 in southern California and the largest has been a 6.4 in Japan. The project, which has about 1,000 sensors in action (though the number varies week to week), is the brainchild of researchers from the University of California, Riverside and Stanford University.

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