I'm just like Klik.

I was first introduced to grid via Seti@home when it launched, as I was active in game dev community at that time and heard the news.

Then life changes and I mostly busy with life. Until I heard of WCG via some Kiva team (and I heard of Kiva from Blender forum - open source LOL!) and I like the fact that WCG have real world use and result. Crunching ever since.

Been lurking here the last while, and thought I should really do a post...

I've been interested in grid computing since the days of Seti@home, but wasn't really into aliens much. Wanted something more humanitarian and down-to-earth, and so I ended up with WCG.

I've been with WCG since 2011, but was dillydallying in adding more machines to contribute. What changed was that my dad died from prostrate+colon cancers in July 2014. That tugged at me, and it reminded me that I could do something about it through WCG.

And then in January 2015 my wife and I had to lease 8 new Hewlett-Packard point-of-sale PCs (we run 4 retail stores in Toronto, Canada) -- one-piece systems that are quad Core i3-based, running Win7 -- that are maintained for us by a third-party, and they have to be left on at night at the stores (and the air conditioning has to be left on anyways as well). So even if the computers break down, they are replaced free of charge. There are also another 8 desktops at the stores that we own outright that also are on WCG, so that's 16 store computers in total.

I also realized I had about 8 PCs at home in storage. So it turns out they could be left on 24/7, since we live in a condominium and the total electricity bill is shared amongst all 200 or so condo owners, so the electric bill is very manageable for us.

It was also a good time to introduce WCG to our 5-year old son (soon to be 6 in September), that PCs can be used not just to be play video games and run retail businesses. So I created a team with his name: "Miles with family and friends."

So I guess over the past 12 months it was sort of a "perfect storm", resulting in a no-brainer for us to contribute almost 30 computers (maybe under 70 cores in total?) to WCG.

Now if we can only convince more family and friends to join. :-)

Klik: very true. We have no dedicated GPUs in our systems (I don't even play video games :-) but definitely good to make use of them if you do.

Regarding the potential...
My background is in retail, and I just realized something: If all the major stores and restaurants out there that use POS systems -- for instance, like the 3 or more cashier lanes at each of the 35,000 McDonalds around the world -- had BOINC running, wouldn't that be incredible? That's at least 105,000 PCs at McDonald's alone. But alas, it seems most companies are worried about potential security issues.

Falconet: Good point. I'm thinking of trying to convince our head office (our stores are part of a franchise) to let other franchisees install WCG on their store systems, but I know head office is a bit paranoid about this kind of stuff.

If anyone knows of a good article or post outlining how safe WCG is, please let me know. Perhaps I can try forwarding that to head office and see what happens. thx.

Rob: Wow, interesting to hear about that sneaker maker.

Our head office actually requires all stores to keep the cashier lane PCs on at night for updates and maintenance, e.g., Windows updates, antivirus scans, merchandise price updates, customer loyalty purchase updates, etc. Sometimes head office staff remotely login during odd-hours of the night or early mornings to do custom maintenance.