Distributed Computing

Friday, 1:16 pm

By Kate

May

20

2005

That’s a term I’d never heard of before—distributed computing—until a few days ago. In the simplest terms, it’s all about harnessing the power of thousands of different personal computers across a vast network to do tasks that even a supercomputer wouldn’t have the power to do. Inexpensively. It’s an intriguing idea that has currently been implemented by a number of organizations.

For an overview of a few different distributed computing projects are doing, check out the Broadband Reports Distributed Computing page. Groups of individuals have banded together to form teams that compete with one another to add an element of fun to distributed computing. Teams of people who donate their computers’ idle processing time to scientific projects that benefit mankind and with the hope that their team will be one that produces a scientific breakthrough. That’s the fun aspect, but not a necessary component of distributed computing, by any means.

The one project that particularly interests me is the Folding@Home project run out of Stanford University. From their web page:

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.

Their goal, of course, is to find the genetic causes of many diseases (like AIDs, Alzheimers, Diabetes, Cancer, and ALS to name just a couple). The thing is...anyone who has a computer hooked up to the internet can participate. It’s like the coolest way to contribute to science without being a scientist or having gobs of money to contribute to scientific endeavors.

Check out the two small flash presentations that help explain what they do and what distributed computing means to both the participant and the project. They’re well done, interesting, and kinda fun—and presented by the Folding@Home team at Broadband Reports—some of the geekiest and coolest people on the web.

Presentation I and Presentation II. (I think #2 is the best...)

For a little more information about distributed computing, read the article at ExtremeTech, Distributed Computing: An Introduction, a layman’s discussion of what it’s all about and who’s doing it and supporting it.

If you have a computer that’s mostly always on and using a constant broadband connection, it might be something you’d be interested in doing, either independently through the Folding@Home website or with a team. (Or maybe you’d be more interested in another project—like the SETI@Home project that’s searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, run out of fun lovin’ Berkeley.) The project’s software doesn’t interfere with anything you’re doing on your computer. It only uses your computer’s idle processing time that you aren’t using. Doesn’t slow down your computer, isn’t dangerous to your computer or you, and adds power to scientific inquiry. That’s a pretty cool deal. Would you think about participating?