Distributed Computing - Dawley Online!

For the past 5 years, I have been a participant in several distributed computing projects. Each distributed computing project breaks the data to be analyzed into small units which are then retrieved by the millions of particpants. The data is then procssed on the user's PC and sent back to the server. The first one that I joined was SETI@home in 1999.

The SETI@Home project analyzes signal data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The length of time required to complete the analysis of a data block can vary widely based on the speed and activity of the PC doing the analysis. I am currently running various grid computing programs on machines running from 90MHz-1.8GHz on various flavors of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X.

In recent months, I have also joined two other computing grid programs. The first project is Predictor which analyses protein structures. Predictor@home is a world-community experiment and effort to use distributed world-wide-web volunteer resources to assemble a supercomputer able to predict protein structure from protein sequence.

I also participate in Climateprediction.net. Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

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