Quote Originally Posted by vaughan View Post
What made you decide to select those projects?
When I was working with public-key cryptographic systems, I wrote software that found random prime numbers for construction of key pairs. So when I got started with BOINC, PrimeGrid caught my eye.

I read about a broad range of science subjects, and molecular biology is one area that fascinates me, and I had read about the protein folding problem. I started with Predictor@Home, but the project seemed to be stalled or closed, so I gave up on it, and chose Rosetta@Home instead.

I was introduced to the others by AMD Users Races: World Community Grid in October 2007, and Cosmology@Home in November 2007. WCG has several projects, but most involve protein folding, like Rosetta. Cosmology involves another science area that fascinates me. Science indicates that the universe is finite, and relativity theory allows space-time to be curved, so that the finite universe doesn't need to have a boundary (it can't). So the big question is: what is the shape of the universe? It is an honor to help solve such a monumental problem.

But I was doing distributed computing before DC started on the Internet. I called it "multiprocessing", and it used about 100 computers on my company's LAN to do simulations and other research projects that were too big for my own PC. I wrote all the software, client-side and server-side, but it was simpler than BOINC because it didn't need to be so general.