The Life and Times of a Credit Union Employee

Distributed computing at CU’s?

Our CU has a ratio of three employees to one server.  Astronomical.  Barely any of those servers get used all day long and rarely do their resources get maxed out.  To me, it seems like a wonderful opportunity to use credit union resources for the better good: distributed computing projects.  While there are many projects, Folding@home may be one of the largest, most well-known projects sponsored by Stanford University.  It studies the folding of proteins and how “mis-folds” can cause diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and many types of cancers.

Seems like a perfect project for credit unions to get involved with and just think about how many unused, or rather available resources, you have in your servers/data center.  Then think about all of those desktops sitting around at night doing nothing.  A search for credit union returns nothing.  I’d love to see my credit union’s name in that list.  Imagine how much work we could contribute if we installed the distributed computing app on all of our clients.  We’d snap our fingers and have close to 200? computers running the app.

A credit union could “go green” and implement real power savings plans for their clients as a community service or let the computers run and contribute to projects like this.  So why aren’t more credit unions doing this?  The thought of managing another app?  NCUA?  Bandwidth?

I’m going to create a generic credit union team that anyone can join and I’m trying to come up with a good, self-explanatory name.  credit_unions is pretty straight forward, but doesn’t have quite the edge.  Ideas?