petersaville.net

We can’t all own a super computer, nothing more I would like more would be have a modern day “Cray Super Computer” but the unfortunate problem is that I cannot find a place to put it. I can however, turn my computer to into a part of a super computer when I am not using it. It’s an old idea of load sharing that has been created by a number of universities. A lot of other universities have also created these projects that allow you to put your computer to work advancing scientific knowledge when it's not helping you.
Google Compute is a feature of the Google Toolbar that enables your computer to help solve challenging scientific problems when it would otherwise be idle. When you enable Google Compute, your computer will download a small piece of a large research project and perform calculations on it that will then be included with the calculations performed by thousands of other computers doing the same thing. This process is known as distributed computing.
The first beneficiary of this effort is a non-profit academic research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses. In the future Google Compute may allow you to also donate your computing time to other worthwhile endeavors. Ref: http://toolbar.google.com/dc/offerdc.html However, if you don’t want to use Google’s technology you can download a project from http://folding.stanford.edu/ or selected a different project from http://www.distributedcomputing.info/