Distributed or Grid Computing

Supercomputers

The first Cray supercomputer was introduced in 1976. It's actually a C shape.

The supercomputer is the top of the heap in power and expense. These are used for jobs that take massive amounts of calculating, like weather forecasting, engineering design and testing, serious decryption, economic forecasting, etc.

The power needed for some calculations is more than even a single supercomputer can manage. In distributed computing, using a PC grid, many computers of all sizes can work on parts of the problem and their results are pooled. A number of current projects rely on volunteers with computers connected to the Internet. The computers do the work when they are not busy otherwise.

The projects that need distributed computing are highly technical. For example, the SETI@Home project looks for signs of intelligent communication in radio signals coming from space. (SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.)

If you volunteer your computer for this project, you might be asked to load a small screen-saver program onto your own computer. When the computer is not busy, the screen saver comes on. The program downloads some signal data, starts to analyze it, and later reports the results back to SETI@Home. Once the program is installed, you do not have to do anything else but watch the progress in the screen saver.

Another method does not use a screen saver, but uses any idle time on your computer to work on the project. Results are sent to the project's home over the Internet.

A large listing of current distributed computing efforts can be found at:

Project	Subject of Study
FightAIDS@Home	modeling evolution of resistance to drugs and designing better AIDS treatments Success: On February 3, 2010, the project announced it found two compounds that make a completely new class of AIDS-fighting drugs possible: "two compounds that act on novel binding sites for an enzyme used by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. The discovery lays the foundation for the development of a new class of anti-HIV drugs to enhance existing therapies, treat drug-resistant strains of the disease, and slow the evolution of drug resistance in the virus."
Folding@home	working on how proteins fold, which is important to understanding how they work and reproduce
Distributed.Net	cryptography and mathematical problems
GOLEM@Home	Completed: evolving robots (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics)
PiHex	Completed: calculating the value of Pi to certain large places

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23