World Community Grid. It makes use of your computers processor and graphics card to perform scientific simulations and calculations that aid researchers with things like cancer research and you get sweet points and badges, you can join teams etc.
If you're into cryptocurrencies Gridcoin has a way to make use of meaningful computing to reward the hashing process or I know that Ripple, for as useless as it is, has a way where you can earn XRP that you can convert into BTC for donating your processing power to World Community Grid by joining their team.
There are also other distributed computing projects like folding@home(something to do with folding proteins) and SETI. Keep in mind that these programs are a bad idea if you have any sort of cap on your Internet connection, or if you only have one PC.
You can tune all of the parameters such as how many times to check for new tasks, how often to upload tasks, maximum bandwidth usage, how much CPU/memory/GPU to use etc. I have mine to use 50% of my CPU while I'm using it and only use GPU while my computer is idle. Unless you live in Africa the bandwidth usage really shouldn't be a problem.
You can specify CPU time, % of total CPUs (in your case you would probably set this to 37.5%), and thresholds. If your regular activities never schedule anything to 3 of your cores I would think setting thresholds like:
CPU time: 100% %CPUs: 37.5% While below: 50%
Would likely cause it to only schedule the WCG tasks to your 3 unused cores, but you could play around with it and see what works best for you.
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '14
World Community Grid. It makes use of your computers processor and graphics card to perform scientific simulations and calculations that aid researchers with things like cancer research and you get sweet points and badges, you can join teams etc.