Any body know anything about Grid Republic?

See this thread here on the Seti Forums

It is the account management system in the works, AFAIK.

Picador Multimedia, in collaboration with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California
Berkeley, is scheduled to launch the public beta test of GridRepublic by June 30, 2005. GridRepublic provides a platform for distributed computing using volunteered resources. Members of the general public who join GridRepublic download and install a special screensaver that allows their computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use. (This screensaver does
not affect performance of the host computer any more than an ordinary screensaver does.) By aggregating idle resources from users around the world, GridRepublic creates a massive supercomputer. Projects available at launch of the public beta will have more than 80,000 participants in 188 countries, supplying more than 106 TeraFLOPS of computing power- far more than any conventional supercomputer. One launch project may be of particular interest to EBA/NYS members and affiliates: www.climateprediction.net is running a massive environmental model intended to forecast climate conditions in the 21 st century.
Picador’s website is: www.picador.net.

hello everyone. rom gave me a head's up about the discussion here and-- as the developer of gridrepublic-- i thought to check in to clarify a few things.

first, gridrepublic is a 501©(3) non profit, not a business. as rom indicated below, we have been working with the boinc development team and not independent of them. as a result, our client has no features that will not also be present in future releases of the standard boinc client-- it is not spyware, adware or malware of any kind, and we assert no private rights over the client software except for the graphic identity (ex. the logo).

in the most general terms, gridrepublic makes finding, joining, and managing boinc projects much easier. our hope is to lower the bar on these three key steps to participation sufficiently to attract users who are technically unsophisticated but who like the idea of doing good for no apparent reason other than it's cool and not too hard.

personally, i got into all this when my dad was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. he was on some experimental medication which worked wonders for a several years but not permanently and the successor version of the drug was slow in coming; the original motivation for gridrepublic was to accellerate the drug development process. i am confident we will be able to do this and many other great things.

i'm afraid i can't at the moment participate in this forum on a regular basis-- i need to keep my heed down and get the project online. but we'll have a beta test soon, and i hope you'll all come and take a look and then i'll come back here and you all can tell me what you think.