Internet Distributed Computing Gains Momentum
[from converge! network digest]
Three weeks after the official launch of the Intel-United Devices “Volunteer Your PC” initiative to fight cancer, over 286,000 users have signed up to donate the spare CPU cycles of more than 368,000 Web-connected PCs.
Over 24 million hours of CPU time has been pooled thus far to help process molecular research being conducted by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford in England and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. The Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project server uses a computer aided drug design program that runs as a screen saver on each client device.
The software models the interaction between potential drug proteins and a target protein that is involved with the growth of cancer. It operates whenever the client CPU would otherwise be idle and then sends the results back automatically over the Web. Intel said the peer-to-peer networking application has the potential to turn the unused computing power of millions of individual PCs into the largest computing resource in history.
The project aims to register six million users this year. ud.com
April 22, 2001
United Devices, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, developed and manages the infrastructure for the Internet distributed computing project. The company plans to apply the Web distributed computing technology to a number of other commercial applications, including web site testing and indexing, 3D animation and rendering, financial analysis and other scientific projects requiring super computing power.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, which originated at the University of California at Berkeley, is the largest Internet distributed computing project to date and has a global network of 3 million Web-connected computers. The computers deliver an average aggregate of about 14 Teraflops and have completed over 500,000 years of processing time over the past year and a half.
The project scans through over 40 GB of data collected daily by the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico in hopes of identifying radio signal fluctuations that may indicate a sign of intelligent life from space. The director of the SETI@home project, Dr. David Anderson, is now the Chief Technical Officer of United Devices. |
