I love distributed computing. (I say this with a bit of caution since my tech-vocabulary isn't always correct.) Distributed computing essentially breaks down large computational problems into small chunks and distributes them among a computer network. For example, the SETI@Home program I used to have on my computer would download a small piece of data from the SETI Program, analyze the data using the extra processing capacity my computer (or anyone's computer) has, and send the results back to the SETI@Home database. Even though the amount of data processed is very small, the collective processing power of many, many computers adds up. In April 2001, a distributing computing collaboration between Intel, Microsoft, Oxford University, and others began work on finding a cure for cancer. When the anthrax attacks were announced in October 2001, the project also focused on finding a cure for anthrax. Personally, I suggest they stick with cancer.

Anyway, I found yet another distributed computing project today. Based at Stanford, the Folding@Home (sound familiar?) project focuses on the calculation-intensive goal of understanding protein folding and aggregation. For you non-biologists out there, proteins fold into specific shapes that are critically important for their function. Researchers suspect that many diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig's disease) are caused by proteins that fold incorrectly and clump together.

I'm looking for some statistics on how powerful such distributed computing programs can be. On Pcworld.com, I found a quote from Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief technical officer of the Intel Architecture Group. He says that a 6 million-user distributed computing network "will have collective processing power equivalent to a 50-terraflop supercomputer running day and night. That's ten times bigger than the world's largest existing supercomputer assembled for less than one percent of the cost." Keep in mind that SETI@Home is the largest distributed computing progject and it has 2.3 million users. That's still an incredible amount of processing power.