Penguin Stumblings

By Michael W. Muchmore

If you've walked past the idle computers of techies during the past few years, you've undoubtedly seen the colorful bars of the SETI@home screensaver. These geeks are doing their part in the quest for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Taking advantage of PCs' idle time, grid projects like SETI@home are able to do computations that would take many years in less than a day. In fact, SETI@home has already done over 2 million computer-years worth of computation.
But now there are dozens of other massively multiprocessor projects—known alternatively as distributed computing (DC), grid computing, or volunteer computing—that can take advantage of your otherwise unused CPU cycles in an effort to do things like predict global climate change, calibrate particle accelerators, or develop drugs to combat cancer and AIDS.

We decided to look into whether these projects have actually accomplished anything or were just spinning CPU cycles unnecessarily and making their users feel virtuous. After considering the platforms, projects, and how distributed computing works, we'll focus in on three project areas for a closer look to see what kind of results they've produced.

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