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Originally Posted by breakingnews
The concept has been around for a while now - probably even at the root of the Web's early spinnings. No time to research specifics, but I remember there being a couple of sites - some even offering to pay - asking to donate idle CPU time to calculating complex mathematical equations and the like. Seeing that college was the first time my computer was hooked up to a high-speed line, it raises the obvious issue of bandwidth. Broadband penetration is soaring - something like 40 percent of US households by 2010 - but things like shared computing could significantly congest networks run by cable and DSL operators, where most people are still getting 1.5 mbps rates or so. Companies and schools will likely ban it, and the average American probably won't know enough to consider installing the program, or they will consider it a backdoor for spyware and hackerz.
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Look, the projects just want your CPU cycles, not your bandwidth. Sure you have to transmit the results, and get the project elements, but each of these parts is trivially small compared to the time required to calculate the results. I participated in the SETI project years ago and processed many hundred of work units.
Basically, you connected to their site and downloaded a small program. This program was designed to grind out the calculation for a given set of parameters.
It was tunable to permit the user to decide how much of the cpu load could be consumed by the process. I could configure it so that it only worked when my screensaver was on. That meant NO impact to my computing power since the cpu cycles at a constant rate, and most of the time it's doing nothing. And when the machine is sufficiently idle that the screen saver has time to kick in, it means that I'm not needing the cpu cycles either. So it computes away, sometimes taking a day or more to complete one work unit. Then, when it's finished, it connects to the site again, uploads the finished work unit (the results, if you will), and downloads another work packet and disconnects.
It takes lots of CPU cycles, not lots of bandwidth.
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Originally Posted by breakingnews
Not a bad idea, but will computer makers resist?
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Why in the world would a carmaker resist increased use of cars?
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Originally Posted by breakingnews
Will the nation's infrastructure get built up enough to adequately support what's needed?
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Uh, like, do we have enough computers? Some problems are more ameable to parallel processing. The ones that are will benefit from greater distribution of machines running their computing client. Other problems don't fit this mold and would not be solved any faster even if there were more machines available.
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Originally Posted by breakingnews
Does it pose security risks?
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That's a good question. This program does have some similar characteristics that other malicious programs have, like autonomously connecting to a given site, but so does Windows Update. Same old answer here, it depends. You should carefully examine what you're inviting into your system first.