Imagine number crunching on thousands of anonymous computers. That may sound dull and lifeless, but distributed computing is anything but. By donating your PC's idle time, you can participate in important medical research and even assist in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Far from the search for little green people, some companies are now using the same distributed computing model for a very down-to-earth objective: turning a profit. With thousands of clients cogitating on and calculating a single task, distributing computing software can help solve business problems from analyzing credit risks to modeling precise financial simulations.
Whether for philanthropy or profit, the principle is the same: Millions of networked PCs sit idle on desktops at homes and offices around the world when they could be running a small software module that does calculations, such as finding important enzymes in cancer research or helping a power company manage peak demand.
In "Finding Aliens and Wiping Out Cancer", we surveyed several distributed computing sites, primarily in the nonprofit sector.
Such projects download small client applications, as well as data sets for serious number crunching, to thousands of computers with unused CPU cycles, donated by people willing to help. For instance, a program that searches for new drugs requires a module that simulates an interaction between a molecule and an enzyme. Thousands of clients download trial molecules to help find a new cure.
On the decidedly for-profit side of the equation, Data-Synapse (www.datasynapse.com) has developed software that runs a peer-to-peer distributed network for speeding up financial transactions on broadband networks.
Other companies are inviting individuals to participate in both scientific and commercial distributed projects. Entropia (www.entropia.com) already has attracted over 170,000 linked computers. (See http://members.entropia.com/stats/Entropia_ overall_stats.asp for more information.) United Devices has also signed up a very large number of users, according to a company source.