Hi!  This is my first post here.  I hope someone can help me!  I'm a very serious student of mathematics... I have a need for a computer which can do a lot of number crunching in the software package known as R.  R can be installed easily on any computer with linux on it.  I've put a lot of time into programming a simulation for a huge research project I've been working on for the past several months -- the project involves tracking the progress of a mutation in a simulated population of animals.  Some of the computations are pretty heavy... the computer I'm running my software on just got to about 26% on a single computation I had it start roughly 2 hours ago!  I need to do many of these computations before I can get anywhere on my project!

I can't help but think there might be some way to take advantage of some of the obsolete bitcoin mining hardware out there to run these computations (I say obsolete because I figure if I go back a few generations it should be pretty cheap).  My alternative to that would be to invest in a powerful computer, but I simply don't have much money (college student).  Does anyone know a way to use the processing power of an ASIC designed for bitcoin mining for something else?  Is this already a thing?  Can anyone at least point me in the right direction?  What sort of language is bitcoin mining software written in?  Perhaps I can write something which uses a similar protocol?