SuperComputing@home
Using BOINC to attaching to a project
I found and installed a BOINC manger for my Ubuntu OS powered computer, a free Linux distribution. Now I can use up those spare CPU cycles to continue my participation in some distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home and Climate Predicting.
This is a fascinating way to solve complex problems. Large problems are divided into many small problems which are distributed to many computers. Later, these small results are reassembled into a larger solution.
Wikipedia notes that on September 2006, the BOINC platorm has over 475,000 active host computers with an processing capacity averaging over 615 terraFLOPS. The fastest supercomputer today performance peaks out at one petaFLOP and a basic hand calculator grinds along at a few FLOP (FLoating point Operations Per Second).
It is exciting to be part of this worldwide "quasi-supercomputing" solution and work to help solve some real-world problems.