Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider.
The good folks at linuxserver.io even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc
Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.
As far as I know, the BOINC client just pulls down new data for processing when each batch of work is done. There’s no pushing and no open tunnel or port. The software risk would be malicious code in a particular project (e.g. if it said it was folding proteins but actually mined bitcoins). I hope there’s some vetting of project code.
The other risk is hardware (especially CPU and RAM) running its lifetime down more quickly because of the continual heavier usage.