Are Screensavers Beating IBM's New Computer?

from the ah-distributed-computing dept

Wired has a fun article comparing the distributed screensaver Folding@Home program with IBM's massively parallel supercomputer BlueGene. Both are trying to look at the process of protein folding, but Folding@Home is already going, thanks to thousands of computers running its screensaver. Of course, there are differences, and no one really sees this as a competition, but it does show how useful distributed computing can be, even if people are getting arrested for using it.
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  1. identicon
    kai, 21 Sep 2001 @ 12:04pm

    browsers as distributed computing?

    A random thought, but could Yahoo! or MSN place little javascript or java snippets that actually did small amounts of computation and achieve the same effect? Obviously, each computation would be small in size, but it's sort of an interesting thought experiment...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Mike (profile), 21 Sep 2001 @ 12:28pm

    Re: browsers as distributed computing?

    I think that would fit under the discussion of stealth or parasitic computing that was mentioned here last month...

    link to this | view in thread ]


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