 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 16, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 24
|
Special Features:
NEW SOFTWARE HELPS SUPERCOMPUTING
POWER
Science enthusiasts currently loan their unused PC power via the Web to
researchers who need it in the hunt for medical cures and scientific
eurekas.
Many will likely follow suit later this summer when Berkeley scientist
David
Anderson debuts an easier and cheaper way to write distributed computing
software.
Anderson, creator of the world's first and most popular distributed
computing
program, SETI@home, inspired 4 million folks to help his team analyze radio
signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
About a dozen other research projects now rely on distributed computing
programs for supercomputing power, but until now, the software has been
expensive and time-consuming to create.
Anderson's free open-source software should change that.
"The more projects that start using distributed computing the more people
will
be interested in lending their computers for research," says Anderson. In the
meantime, here are four ways to put your idle PC to good use.
Screensaver mission The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)
Searches
for ever-larger, world-record-setting Mersenne prime numbers.
PC's in use: 130,000
Avg. power on tap*: 9 teraflops
The payoff so far: GIMPS has discovered five Mersenne primes in six years,
including one with more than 4 million digits. A PC would need 25,000 years to
do that!
Screensaver mission SETI@home Searches for signals from extraterrestrial
civilizations. Suspicious units are flagged and scrutinized.
PC's in use: 4,350,000
Avg. power on tap*: 56.2 teraflops
The payoff so far: Idle computers have analyzed more than 5 billion
possible
ET signals. So far, 166 have warranted a closer look, though none have panned
out.
Screensaver mission The Smallpox Research Grid Searches for drugs that
fight
the smallpox virus. Each PC analyzes sets of 110 potential drug
candidates.
PC's in use: 2,000,000
Avg. power on tap*: 180 teraflops
The payoff so far: Since February the grid has screened 35 million
potential
drug candidates, a chore that would take a single CPU 7,000 years to
complete.
Screensaver mission Climateprediction.net Set to launch this summer, the
screensaver will help predict significant changes in Earth's climate.
PC's in use: Launching 2003: Hopes to lure one million users
Avg. power on tap*: Unknown
The payoff so far: The project recruited 15,000 users in the two-week
testing
phase. Download the real thing this summer.
* A teraflop equals a trillion calculations per second. The world's largest
supercomputer operates at 35.9 teraflops. The average PC manages approximately
0.0001 teraflops.
|