Buying a supercomputer costs millions of dollars, then thousands more each year to maintain it. That's not to mention the hefty electric bill to keep the massive system running.

So it goes without saying that average Joes can't just get themselves a supercomputer. But many scientific researchers also don't have access to them, even if they work at a university that owns one.

Particularly in the health, meteorology and astrophysics fields, scientists need immense processing to perform complex calculations in a reasonable amount of time. It might take a decade to run a set of modeling experiments on a standard personal computer.

But if you link millions of ordinary PCs together and split the calculations across them, you get a virtual supercomputer. That's exactly what some people are doing.

Several organizations have developed virtual supercomputers by getting volunteers to donate their PCs' processing power when the machines are not in use. Anyone can go to the groups' websites to download software that connects their computers to the grid of other PCs.

Multiplied a thousand or even million times, the combined processing power of all of those PCs is formidable.




More . . .

You are preaching to the choir / ministers here. We know this part already; that is why we are involved. Nice to see that other people are paying attention to this kind of thing as well.

awww you guys are a tease....I thought this would be one of them 486/pentiums builds. lol