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January 31, 2005
Distributed Computing
For those that dont know, distributed computing works by asking ordinary joes with computers and internet access to download a little piece of software that acts as a screen saver on their computer. Wehn the screen saver kicks in the software will retrieve a bit of data from a central location, crunch it for a while and send back the results.
The most famous of these is of course the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) distributed computing initiative. This has been trying to find signs of intelligent life in the universe by processing data from Radio Telescopes. No results so far...
There are a few other distirbuted computing projects taking off, none quite as ubiquitous as the SETI program, that are actually achieving results.
One of these is the study of the problem of global warming.
The results? We're fucked apparently. The program ran something like 50,000 simulations - a lot more than the previous largest run of 128.
Apparently the earth seems to be a lot more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought. Meltdown expected by 2050.
I'll be 80 by then. I'll probably appreciate not having to make my pension stretch to heating bills...
The other thing about this is that you must choose between either SETI@HOME or the climate net program. What happens when there are more of these initiatives? Research bodies will have to adopt aggressive marketing to try and convince people to download there distributed computing client.
What about having a distributed computing client that would accept both data and algorithm (the maths bit...) from one of the research bodies so that you install one distributed computing client and then the computing power is available as a pool to whatever research bodies need it.
I dont know how it would be divvied up - committee? Round robin? Throw of the dice? Equal shares?
Posted by dottie at January 31, 2005 1:56 PM