Nasa Seti

Those of us who have watched the development of the computer industry in recent years will remember that one of the alternatives to massive supercomputers developed ten or fifteen years ago was the use of a large number of smaller computers working in tandem. The idea is to use a server "massively parallel" that can scale to hundreds or thousands of processors working in cooperation during the execution of a project that requires massive computing power. The server gives mainly to activities or parts of tasks between machines with low and collects the resulting data for a completed project.

distributed computing projects are the contemporary version of massively parallel computing. The advent of broadband technology has allowed the use of machines that are remotely located and who should not be permanently connected to the mother ship, "so to speak. The result was fascinating projects that combine digital cooperation in social work, cultural and medical issues include any interested party has the right equipment and wants to participate.

One of the most recent news to be an ongoing project at Stanford University called Folding @ Home (FAH). Stanford researchers are trying to understand a "folding" process that occurs in proteins before moving on to become enzymes or antibodies. Scientists hope that understanding the folding process can help them understand why certain proteins go awry and cause diseases like Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis.

The project requires massive repetitions of the process of folding simulations and, consequently, enormous amounts of computing power. Stanford has set up a computer network to perform repetitive bending and invited the participation of stakeholders with the communications bandwidth and computer power to perform properly. Sony recently announced that its latest platform Playstation 3 will have sufficient power to allow players in possession of the new box to participate in the program at Stanford. Kudos to Sony for a marketing strategy and great Stanford recognition from an unusual source of untapped power of distributed computing.

Another of the most interesting distributed computing is operated by SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Headquartered in Berkeley, and is basically in the process of analyzing billions of bits of data from radio telescopes operated by the University and NASA. The vast quantities of data requires massive computing power, so the SETI recruits volunteers with computers to connect with the SETI project and allow servers to SETI to use these PCs.

When a volunteer is online, SETI takes control of the computer and uses it to perform analysis functions with the software that was provided. They also warn that participating in the SETI distributed computing project has been to become a serious resource hog - thus limiting the participation of your machine if necessary.

The software for SETI and many other distributed computing projects BOINC is the Berkeley Infrastructure for Network Computing. This program essentially provides the operating platform for remote participation in projects of parallel computing, and many scientific efforts have put it to work.

If you are so slanted, a little, you can choose to include the BBC Climate Change Experiment (global warming), United Devices Cancer Research (screening of molecules against target proteins for cancer), and Fight Aids @ Home (identify product characteristics that are resistant to change). The latter project has a website in Chinese for its first phase, completed tasks and 9,000,000 using about 1400 years to load on more than 60,000 computers.