Computer Action Team (CAT) managed school computers at Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon may run with little-no workloads being run on them. This period is known as Idle Compute Time. Idle Compute Time is an economic and environmental issue that has been addressed through projects such as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) and World Community Grid (WCG). These projects give idle computers workloads to perform, with little-no extra cost as these computers are already running. The PSU Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and PSU CS Graduate Student Organization (GSO) propose that many parties would benefit (see below for a quick summary of benefits) -- PSU, the research society, the environment, etc. -- if CAT installed this software on their machines. Visit our full explanation at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZTexXIV3ux1C1B...

Benefits:

• Put CAT's idle computer time to use
• Power scientific research
• No longer waste computational power and electricity from CAT's computers when they are not being used
• Get more value/return on investment (ROI) out of CAT's high-end computer systems
• Encourage more scientific research involving distributed computing
• Make the CECS a leader in the distributed computing field
• Eliminate the need for expensive supercomputers for many research projects
• More quickly make scientific discoveries
• Set a precedent for future PSU research projects
• Create a system so that other colleges/universities or organizations can easily donate their idle computer time
• Promote the CECS and the sponsoring organization among the research community
• Provide future funding to CAT and the sponsoring organization (for every Prime number that we find)
• Provide national media coverage to PSU, the CECS and the sponsoring organization (for every Prime number that we find)
• Encourage students to donate their own idle computer time
• CAT can more quickly find and fix hardware issues before they affect students (example)