As a young techie, it was hard to resist the temptation of looking for space aliens with my PC. And so I became an early adopter of SETI@Home, a project that now counts 3 million users who contribute their spare PC processing power to scanning radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life.
SETI@Home turned out to be the first of a menagerie of “volunteer grid computing” projects. Thanks in part to BOINC, an open source platform developed for running such projects, you can now choose between modeling the transmission of malaria in Africa, predicting climate change, simulating the particles traveling in a high speed particle accelerator and so on. And you can put to work other sources of computing power in your home, such as your game console.
It’s quite likely that the majority of volunteers today hail from the techie community, a small fraction of total PC users. That suggests a massive reservoir of computing power sitting idle out there. To get a sense of the scale of the untapped potential, consider Folding@Home, a project simulating protein folding, which has managed, by leaning on volunteers alone, to command processing capacity that exceeds one petaflop, making it one of the most powerful grid computing networks on the planet.
What if there was some way for businesses to tap into this dormant resource? It’s certainly possible with the right model in place – we know that FON has had some success with getting folks to share their private Wi-Fi networks.
I wonder if a marketplace for compute cycles is the key. Users would download a client and receive payments for the cycles they contribute. And businesses would be able to plug in and get rate-based utility computing. Yes, I realize there are many issues to overcome – such as maintaining the security of corporate data in a public grid. But given the recent trends & advances in distributed computing, I wonder if it’s only a question of when, and not if, such a marketplace will emerge.
