Power Of Grid Computing For Research

It is always nice to see when non-profit or open source organizations come up with great ideas that other people would be willing to participate in voluntarily.

One such idea was to make more efficient use of the computer resources that are available and under-utilized on computers connected to the internet. A popular project involved in this grid computing task was the SETI at home project, which is designed to monitor incoming waves from outer space in hope of one day detecting extraterrestrial life. By utilizing the computer resources from willing participants the distributed grid is able to perform more analysis on each computer and together function like a very powerful supercomputer.

It is also nice to see when a company's interest intersects with the interest of the research community as was the case with the recently announced partnership between IBM and the science community to produce more of these grid based projects that would allow to do some good research for social benefits.

It good that such projects are becoming more and more common and that there are creative minds that find new ways to optimize the use of resources.