Posted at the PCMag Forum/Opinion Columnist forum

"So, Oliver Rist describes Grid Computing as companies and institutions going out and renting additional CPU power from suppliers like Sun Grid or Amazon to get their data processing done.

Mr. Rist has missed the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Under various names, grid computing is going on right now as we speak. BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (http://boinc.berkeley.edu) is a venue for what is called Public Distributed Computing. PC owners download a BOINC agent, a little piece of software, and then sign on to research projects from universities and scientific institutions all over the globe. We, the "crunchers", we get downloads of work units for our PC's to process in their idle time. The granddaddy of all projects is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which claims to have 500,000 volunteer crunchers, making it the most powerful super computer in the world. All of this is non-profit and totally secure. Some folks preserve the name "Grid Computing" for that form which will use a large number of computers under one umbrella, like, only on campus. What one calls it is of little note.


There are projects at BOINC doing work on pulsars, climate, mathematical problems, Malaria, protein folding, developing chemotherapies, DNA sequencing, sub-atomic particles. At World Community Grid (www.worldcommunitygrid.org) there are projects on Cancer, AIDS, Dengue Fever, and the African Climate.

As I said above, all of the work takes place while your computer is idle. This is no resource hog.

WCG's main partner in the work is IBM. Now, IBM will use some of the knowledge gained in this social good for its own adventure with Google and The Cloud, a grid which Google hopes to get up and runnng down the road somewhere.

I have urged PC Magazine (Lance_Ulanoff@ziffdavis.com) and PC World (Harry_McCracken@pcworld.com) to get up an article or two on this very worthwhile endeavor.

If you are a "cruncher", please email these guys and tell them we need their help. With almost a billion PC's in use, there are something just south of a million crunchers.

If you are not yet a cruncher, I urge you to visit the BOINC and WCG sites and take a look. We need everyone we can get. There are downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

Please lend a hand.



>>RSM "

Anyone who looks at this post can easily write an email to these two guys. I have also been banging on David Pogue (Pogue@nytimes.com), NYTimes;Walt Mossberg (mossberg@wsj.com), WSJ; and Steve Wildstrom (steve_wildstrom@businessweek.com) at BusinessWeek.

Crunching needs so heat!!

>>RSM