![]() ![]() It can take several person-years to develop the software, because it must perform unobtrusively on different operating systems in up to a million computers while protecting against erroneous results and malicious attacks. BOINC, for instance, offers open-source infrastructure code so researchers do not have to write their own. Such hosts are also time-savers for scientists. ![]() In coming months BOINC partners will include PlanetQuest and Other umbrella distributed-computing software platforms include, which is running two projects to find compounds against cancer and predict three-dimensional protein structures from amino acid sequences, and, which currently has nine projects looking for drugs against various ailments, such as malaria and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human relative of mad cow disease. Among the biggest is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which hosts and as well as the formerly independent, which joined in August. Anderson expects hundreds of projects to emerge in the next few years and the number of participating CPUs to reach 30 million from the roughly 1.3 million of today.Ī key development in the surge is the formation of distributed-computing platforms that can host multiple projects. Since the first public distributed-computing project-the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search-was launched in 1996 to look for large prime numbers, virtual supercomputing projects have emerged for the serious (testing potential drugs with to the sublime (the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator). The result is unparalleled processing muscle: IBM's BlueGene/L, now the most powerful supercomputer, cranks out about 70 trillion flops meanwhile conservatively runs off roughly 500,000 PCs at more than 100 trillion flops, says director David P. Distributed computing takes advantage of this spare capacity, dividing large tasks into tinier ones and sending them over the Internet for usually idle computers to work on. Save for computationally intense tasks such as rendering graphics, typical modern PCs that perform at least one billion floating-point operations per second (that is, most home computers built since about 2000) almost never employ their full power. And no need to choose one mission over another: software can now multitask, and enough microchip muscle exists to handle many more distributed-computing projects. Fans of the spacetime continuum can now uncover gravitational ripples at their desks thanks to the February launch of The project is one of the latest of at least 60 projects now on the Internet, in which personal-computer users can donate spare processor power to help solve scientific problems.
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