Oh, so Sam Palmisano made CEO of IBM. Guess that was expected. He wants to focus on on-demand computing (his word for corporatising distributed computing projects). Shortly, there will be companies creating this [distributed computing] market – focusing on aggregating the retail computing power, and using them across several projects. (Google is already trying to do that through its toolbar, and so is Intel.) – S Anand, 29 Sep 2002 And now, IBM. I was prophetic :-)
Bottomquark’s review of distributed computing projects. What’s striking is that there are commercial distributed projects – where companies pay for the use of your idle time. That’s a powerful concept. Instead of buying computers from a vendor, or even computing time from a vendor, these projects are buying computing time retail. The reason I guess this works is the dis-aggregation of computing time. When I buy a computer, I need its use for about 12 hours a day. But I’m paying for its availability 24 hours a day. Since I have that spare power, I can sell it as long as there’s a liquid market for such power. ...
Following SETI, CERN is using distributed computing.