BYTE MARKS
Harnessing Net power for greater good

By Burt Lum

Just imagine all the computers connected to the Internet.

Imagine millions upon millions of Macs, PCs, Unix workstations and even supercomputers connected to the Internet, either viewing Web content or serving it up. All that computational power linked through the Net and, for the most part, lying idle. If you could collectively harness these idle processors and apply them to a computational problem, you could perhaps solve some seemingly insurmountable tasks. That is the promise of grid computing.

With desktop processors surpassing gigahertz speeds, collectively the available processing power could measure in the teraflops (1 trillion floating-point operations per second). That's huge. If computational duties could be spread amongst available idle processors, then you would not only get the job done faster, but you'd also save a lot of money by not buying that humongous supercomputer.

Three years ago, that thought crossed the minds of people working for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (setiathome.berkeley.edu). They had the challenge of analyzing an incredible amount of radio astronomic data collected from outer space.

If these data could be divided and sent to idle computers for processing, the job could get done faster. So SETI@home was born. When you run the SETI@home software, it functions like a screensaver app. It takes predetermined data sets and performs calculations on them, then sending the results back to SETI headquarters.

Since then, more grid applications have surfaced. From the Stanford Alzheimer Research Program come folding.stanford.edu. You can apply your idle processor time to the discovery of new proteins in the search for a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

Similarly, you can lend your computer to the fight against AIDS at www.fightaidsathome.org.

A pioneer in the field of grid computing is Ian Foster, who spoke in Hawai'i at the www2002 conference. The latest work in this field is documented at www.globus.org.

Reach Burt Lum at burt@brouhaha.net.