August 28, 2000
Fighting Cancer with Your PC
Tidbit Archive
| Distributed computing made its debut on "Teich's Tidbits" one year
ago (August 30, 1999), in an
item on SETI@Home, a project that enlists home computers in the search
for extraterrestrial life. The SETI@Home experiment has been extremely
successful. In less than a year and a half, its nearly 2.3 million
users have contributed more than 378,000 years of CPU time to the
project. Although this massive effort has not yet found E.T., it
has yielded some interesting results, which are reported in SETI@Home's
online newsletter.
Not surprisingly, the success of this effort to use idle time on personal computers to analyze enormous amounts of data has inspired entrepreneurs to look for other applications. Among those that are already being explored are cancer and other areas of medical research, global change research, and economic research. In an article in the August 18, 2000 issue of Science magazine*, one entrepreneur, Steve Armentrout of Parabon Computation Inc., observed "Modern computers are so fast that even if you're typing as fast as you can, the processor is yawning." As noted in the Science article, tapping into this vast reservoir of power to create what amounts to a distributed supercomputer only became practical when Internet connectivity became widespread and a secure platform (such as that provided by Java) became available. While some of the firms are relying on volunteers, such as those
working for SETI@Home, others are offering to pay the individuals whose
computers it employs and at least one (Process
Tree Network, see below) is applying Amway's
business model and will pay you a percentage of the fees earned by those
who sign up for your "branch."
*Note: Full access to Science Online requires a subscription. |
Links:Parabon Computation Inc. -- "Computing outside the box." Includes a description of Parabon's distributed computation system for chemotherapy and a link for downloading the beta version of its program.
Popular Power, Inc. is applying distributed computing on the Internet to optimization of flu vaccines.
"Distributed Computing Goes Commercial," by Elinor Abreu in The Standard (July 3, 2000). Good, recent article about distributed computing on the Internet.
"Putting Idle Computers to Work," by Shannon Henry, The Washington Post (June 15, 2000). An article about Parabon, its founder Steven Armentrout, and the field of distributed computing.
Entropia Inc. A firm that intends to apply distributed computing to many problem areas, including medical, environmental, and economics research, as well as entertainment.
Process Tree Network. The unique feature of this distributed computation firm is that you can sign up others and receive a percentage of their payments. A subsidiary of Distributed Science, Inc.
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