FORGET buying shares in ailing dotcoms. You will soon be able to earn money
without lifting a finger鈥攋ust by leaving your PC switched on
overnight.
A new breed of companies is set to pay computer users for their machines鈥�
spare time. All you need is an Internet connection. And you might help make a
medical or scientific breakthrough into the bargain.
The US-based companies Parabon, Distributed Science and United Devices plan
to divide up corporate computing tasks and farm them out to tens of thousands of
PC owners via the Internet. To join their efforts, you just download some
software, connect to the Net occasionally and wait to get paid.
Advertisement
How much you鈥檒l get paid for doing nothing is still under wraps. Steve
Armentrout, founder of Parabon, says he will be announcing pay scales in the
autumn. Individuals will be paid for their computers鈥� work, which will be
calculated in megahertz-hours. 鈥淲e estimate an average PC will earn at least
$10 a month,鈥� says Jim Albea, chief operations officer for Distributed
Science.
United Devices, based in Austin, Texas, was founded by David Anderson, the
computer scientist who launched the SETI@home project (麻豆传媒,
25 July 1998, p 46). SETI@home amassed 300 000 years of computer time during its
first year鈥攕o it鈥檚 no surprise that Anderson believes there鈥檚 money in
idle processors.
Distributed Science, based in Huntsville, Alabama, plans to run massively
parallel programs over the Internet to model protein folding, test integrated
circuit designs, run fluid dynamics studies and render 3D graphics in a fraction
of the time possible using a single supercomputer. 鈥淲e believe our distributed
networks have twice the computer power of IBM鈥檚 latest supercomputer, ASCI
White,鈥� says Albea. Distributed Science claims over 39 000 individuals, with 77
000 computers, have signed up so far. On average, 300 individuals register 500
more computers each day. 鈥淧eople are dragging old PCs out of the cupboard to get
connected to the project,鈥� says Albea.
The systems work in a similar way to the SETI@home screen saver. Big programs
will be chopped up into thousands of small, manageable units that are then
farmed out to subscribers. The program only kicks in when the computer is left
idle. 鈥淯nlike SETI@home we are not restricted to a single project,鈥� explains
Albea. 鈥淥ur networks can be applied to any problem.鈥�
Distributed Science has guarded against hackers by using 128-bit encryption
on all communications. Armentrout claims Parabon鈥檚 systems are also secure. But
not everyone is satisfied. 鈥淚鈥檇 be very surprised if a pharmaceuticals company
would farm out its data processing,鈥� says Matthew Woodwark, head of
bioinformatics for AstraZeneca UK, which models protein folding for drug
development. 鈥淲e鈥檇 love to use the Internet in this way, but we can鈥檛 run the
risk of our data being copied. But we are considering running distributed
solutions internally to increase computer power.鈥�
And while the private sector shares data around domestic PCs,
government-funded scientists in Britain are working on distributed networks of
supercomputers. The High-End Computing (HEC) initiative is developing a network
of supercomputers called The Grid. It will connect monster machines in
Edinburgh, Manchester and Daresbury, Cheshire, to give researchers undreamed-of
number-crunching power. The Grid will later go international.