When the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute lost its government funding in 1993, things looked bleak for the future of the program. Forced to rely on private funding, SETI's contributions to projects like the University of California's SERENDIPâ€"an attempt to locate radio signals of extraterrestrial origin by scanning the heavens with the Arecibo radio telescopeâ€"faced certain doom.
That is, until David Gedye came up with a way to eliminate the program's expensive operating costs through distributed computing. The result: SETI@home.
Now the program meets its computing needs entirely through public support, breaking up large computing tasks into small chunks and passing them out to thousands, even millions, of machines through a peer-to-peer Internet network. Since SETI@home went live in May 1999, the project has amassed more than 2.3 million supporters worldwide who have to do little more than install a screen saver on their computers. When PC owners are away from their desks, the screen saver analyses radio signals, passing completed work back to SETI. When users return, the program relinquishes the machine.
In less than two years, SETI@home users have contributed 449,000 years of CPU time to the projectâ€"for only the incidental cost of electricity.
SETI's solution gave Steven Armentrout an idea. "Being an investor and investment manager, I saw the business opportunity of bringing distributed computing out into an Internet environment," says Armentrout, CEO of Parabon Computation, a two-year-old company specialising in distributed computing. Armentrout expects to use this technology in the pharmaceutical, chemical, engineering, and financial industries. Though for now Parabon dedicates its network of "providers" (Parabon's term for people who run its screen saver application) entirely to pro bono cancer research, the company plans to take on clients in the for-profit financial modeling space within the year.
Parabon isn't alone. A host of other companies are developing similar projects. Marc Hedlund, CEO of Popular Power, says, "We've had a very easy time attracting engineers to work on this. A lot of people who had been designing things like shopping carts and greeting cards on the Web saw this as a way of doing something really engaging, possibly curing a disease. As a result, we were able to put software out in April." Not bad for a 17-person company that was founded in January 2000. Other major players in the space include Distributed Science and United Devices, which boasts SETI@home designer David P. Anderson as its chief technology officer.
How effective are these multi-provider systems? High-end computing power is measured in teraflops, or trillions of floating point operations per second. The world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's US$110 million ASCI White, can run at a speed of 12.3 teraflops. "Our network does 120 teraflops," says Harris Hall, chief financial officer of Distributed Science, which has 138,000 computers running its screen saver application. Popular Power has tens of thousands of participants it will soon be paying to stress-test Web sites for its clients. "We're saving them between 40 and 60 percent," Hedlund says.
