Using unused PCs to create a supercomputer for toughest tasks

Link millions of personal computers together and you have a volunteer grid computer that works almost like a supercomputer, worth millions of Dollars. Health, meteorology and astrophysics scientists need immense processing to work with numbers for precision, to perform such calculations within a given time frame is not always possible nor feasible for the human mind, and even standard personal computers are not able to perform such jobs. Thus, the need for a supercomputer is felt.

Supercomputer made of unused PCs

It is not always easy or handy to use such a machine, not to mention, super comps are viable only when some calculation of huge social or international importance is to be undertaken. But World Community Grid, FoldingAtHome, SetiAtHome and EinsteinAtHome, together with a handful of other community-based projects, are using a volunteer grid computer. They have volunteers who donate their laid down PCs' processing power whenever they can and the effort has proved quite fruitful.

How do World Community Grid and others function? The projects perform complex computing tasks in bits. They divide the task into billions of pieces and every task is then sent over to the networked PCs. When the power of all is rolled into one, it works wonders to everyone's gain and awe.

Not many people know that World Community Grid is run by IBM. Its grid boasts of a network of 1.8 million PCs and its total processing power is billed to equal one of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world. That takes the IBM project ahead of SetiAtHome, which was established by the University of Berkley and is one of the better known cloud computing projects. While Folding@home is a Stanford project for researching protein folds and incidentally is the largest with around 350,000 donated PCs, Einstein@home is an Albert Einstein Institute and University of Wisconsin research program to study gravitational waves.

Via: CNN