A supercomputer made of unused PCs
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Buying a supercomputer costs millions of dollars, then thousands more each year to maintain it. That's not to mention the hefty electric bill to keep the massive system running.
So it goes without saying that average Joes can't just get themselves a supercomputer. But many scientific researchers also don't have access to them, even if they work at a university that owns one.
Particularly in the health, meteorology and astrophysics fields, scientists need immense processing to perform complex calculations in a reasonable amount of time. It might take a decade to run a set of modeling experiments on a standard personal computer.
But if you link millions of ordinary PCs together and split the calculations across them, you get a virtual supercomputer. That's exactly what some people are doing.
Several organizations have developed virtual supercomputers by getting volunteers to donate their PCs' processing power when the machines are not in use. Anyone can go to the groups' websites to download software that connects their computers to the grid of other PCs.
Multiplied a thousand or even million times, the combined processing power of all of those PCs is formidable.
Meet the new #1 supercomputerThe concept is called volunteer grid computing, and it's being used by projects like World Community Grid , SetiAtHome , FoldingAtHome and EinsteinAtHome , among others. The projects take a computing task, cut it up into literally billions of pieces, and send them out to the PCs in the network.
SETI@home is perhaps the most well-known of the projects. It was set up by University of Berkeley researchers in 1999 with the goal of finding radio signals indicative of intelligent life outside of Earth.
Folding@home is a Stanford project for researching protein folds, and Einstein@home is a University of Wisconsin and Albert Einstein Institute research program to study gravitational waves. Of the university projects, Folding@home is the largest, with about 350,000 donated PCs.
, Fortune 500 ), dwarfs all of those academic grids. With 1.8 million connected PCs, its combined processing power can equal that of one of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world -- it generally floats between the top five and the top 10, depending on how many PCs are connected at any given time. With 300,000 more PCs, IBM estimates that the World Community Grid could be more powerful than the globe's top supercomputer.Ibm Laptop Part - News
World Community Grid, run by IBM (IBM, Fortune 500), dwarfs all of those academic grids. With 1.8 million connected PCs, its combined processing power can equal that of one of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world -- it generally floats
"Having that access is very much like owning an ubiquitous laptop with an enormous amount of computing power," he elaborates. "Our IBM technology really is the DNA of the technology industry," Holley says of the company's past 100 years.
As someone who remembers trying to win the World Cup over and over again on an old IBM laptop playing Rugby 2001, I've always held an interest in rugby games. It's been four years since the last release of a Rugby video game, and so the build up to the
IBM's PC Convertible, from 1986, was the firm's first 'laptop' computer. It weighed over 5kg, and had a detachable screen allowing it to be used with a monitor on a desk. It was costly compared to rival machines from vendors such as Toshiba,
According to Lauren Whitehouse, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, the laptop data protection challenge needs to be—and is—increasingly viewed as part of the broader “endpoint” backup challenge, covering everything from desktops,
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