The Guru Mountain DC Team was formed in April of 2006 by Jeff Gu (founder) and Skip Da Shu (co-founder) for the purpose of putting our computer equipment to use doing something beneficial to mankind. Distributed computing is becoming an extremely valuable tool for scientific and educational research in a variety of fields. It is expanding our knowledge in fields like physics, mathematics and astronomy. It is doing essential research in developing drugs and treatments for a number of diseases. It is unlocking many secrets in the biology, chemistry and climate science fields. It accomplishes all of this with the volunteer computer time donated by tens of thousands of people just like you, who instead of shutting down their computers when they’re done checking their e-mail, leave them on with a simple program running in the background. This program allows dozens of research projects to use the computer’s idle time to perform calculations. All of these computers, thousands of them home computers like yours, form a giant supercomputer with more sheer computing power than any supercomputer on earth.

We invite you to join in on this technological advancement, and do something that costs you almost nothing, yet can make a huge difference in how effectively scientific research can provide new technologies and benefits that everyone can use. Don’t think that your one computer can’t make a difference. This technology works because so many people out there want to do just one thing in their life that might really matter. Each one of those “one computers” adds up to tens of thousands of them working to benefit scientific knowledge and progress. Yes, some of us spend a lot of money and put dozens of computers to work doing nothing but crunching numbers for distributed computing projects. We’re the hardcore addicts of the DC world. You don’t have to go all crazy with it and fill your basement with computers. The one or two you have now will contribute a nice chunk of work each day toward the goals of the projects that interest you.

Your computer isn’t going to wear out any faster, it isn’t going to run up your electric bill, and you won’t have to babysit the program all the time. Each time you turn your computer on, a big surge of current rushes into all of its circuits and components. That is when things are most likely to go up in smoke. While running, it doesn’t use much electricity. You can probably turn one light off in the house and be dead even on the light bill. All modern monitors, when they blank the screen after being idle for awhile, switch to energy saving mode. They draw only a few watts in this mode. There’s a good reason why most businesses and people with a lot of computers just leave them on all the time. With distributed computing, you can have them do something important to all of us while they’re running, instead of just sitting there doing nothing at all.

We’ve been doing this for a few years, now. The biggest problem we have in getting people involved is sheer apathy and lack of interest in anything but themselves and their own (usually meaningless, trivial and short term) computer interests. You don’t have to be a computer genius to do this. You have a computer, you found this site and you read this far. Chances are good that you probably aren’t as apathetic and self-centered as most people, are interested in technology and might even be interested in giving scientific research a little help, without having to write a check for anything! You have all of the qualifications to do exactly that. You’ve found a place where people will be glad to help you get started and sort out all the details. If you think we’re not so crazy, after all, then you’ve even found a team that will be glad to have you onboard.

Your computer might not be the latest, greatest powerhouse. But it can do this kind of work just fine. You paid for the thing… you can go on using it while it is crunching for science (only high-end video games will be noticeably laggy while crunching, and you can suspend it while you’re gaming)… you can set it up to suspend crunching while you’re using the computer (when the keyboard or mouse are used, like a screensaver shuts off when you do this)… or, like most of us, just leave it crunching all the time if you’re not a gamer… you will meet new people with a common interest… you’ll have a new hobby that doesn’t require you to keep spending money or commit a lot of time to doing. Face it, you’re out of excuses. Just look around on our site, register for the discussion forums and ask questions, follow the links for more information and decide for yourself if you have a few minutes each week to spare. We’re not going anywhere. We’re here for the long haul, because we believe in this technology and we actually want to make a difference, however small, in how this world ends up down the road.

Thank you for visiting our site, and we hope you’ll return often.

Jeff Gu, team founder