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More about IBM and Cern- Gridcomputingplanet

More about Cern-Hepwww
The Large Electron Positron Collider at Cern-Hepwww

It's not as big as Diamond, but it's not like they are building the Diamond accelerator out of the blue out in the middle of nowhere with no support infrastructure in place. They are building it after some consideration of the infrastructure already at RAL, which just so HAPPENS to be out in the middle of nowhere. ;-)

Wonderful country however, I need to go back for more beer. ;-)

Your friendly neigborhood physicist.

The reasons for siting at Daresbury seemed to be well thought out and sensible - see the campaign website for more information.

The government has decided to site it in the expensive South of England, putting the existing synchroton research team at Daresbury in jeopardy and virtually guaranteeing a dispersal of talent.

The extent to which communication is a bottleneck in parallel processing depends strongly on the problem at hand and the algorithm used to tackle it. Some problems are amenable to batch processing (e.g. Seti@home), others require some level of boundary-synchonisation (simple fluid codes), others require synchronisation across all nodes (e.g. more complex plasma simulations)

For batch processing tasks, there isn't an issue. For the other's the loose synchronisation may be acceptable depending on the knock-on effect. Loosening the synchronisation obviously decreases the network and infrastructural burden on the job allowing the algorithm to scale better, but the effect of this has to be carefully studied.

This is important to the application developer, but is not particularly relevent to grids per-say. Grid activity, at the moment, is mainly towards developing code at a slightly lower level than application-dependant communication. It is already building up an infrastructure in which jobs can run which tries to remove any dependancy on a central machine. This is because having a central server is a design that doesn't scale well (and also introduces a single point-of-failure). The Globus toolkit provides a basic distributed environment for batch parallel processing, including a PKI-based Grid security system: GSI.

On top of this, several projects are developing extra functionality. For example, the DataGrid project is adding may component, such as automatic target selection, fabrication management (site management, fault tolerance, ...), data management (replica selection, management and optimisation, grid-based RDBMS), network monitoring infrastructure and so on.

The basic model is currently batch-processing, but this will be extended soon to include sub-jobs (both in parallel and with a dependency tree) and an abstract information communication system which could be used for intra-job communication (R-GMA).

The applications will need to be coded carefully to fully exploit the grid, and reducing network overhead is an important part of this, but The Grid isn't quite at that stage, yet. But we're close to having the software needed for people to just submit jobs to the grid, without caring who provides the computing resource, or the geographical location they'll run.

Not quite, but close. There's a rough table at http://ast.star.rl.ac.uk/hr.html

Basically, for a star of 3 solar masses the figure is 370 million, about 3% of our Sun's expected life. That drops to 3 million years for a star of 60 solar masses.

The more I see worthwhile DC projects out there like ECCp-109, Folding at home, and now ClimatePredition.net, the more I think I should participate in these rather than SETI@home (which I've been doing for 3+ year)

Maybe it just comes down to what can aid humanity vs. what is simply a shot in the dark.

During my Astrophysics degree, we used the Starlink software suite, it comprises numerous data-reduction and analysis tools, and is freely available. It is used by a large proportion of UK academic institutions.

Zirconium Tungstate on the other hand has an intrinsic anomalous negative volumetric CTE which occurs over the temperature range from just above 0 K to 1050 K.

This stuff is probably pretty boring to the average slashdot geek as evidenced by the absolute mighty tempest of comments generated here but if you are interested check out http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/ISIS97/feature1.pdf

It might not be provable in a formal logic sense, but it is a useful way of thinking about scientific theories. Occam's Razor is more often quoted as "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily". It's interesting that you use the example of quantum physics, as it has been used here, too.

Although you're implying that Quantum Physics is much more complex than Classical Physics, a quantum theory is necessary to explain observable phenomena. The Schrodinger equation is, in its own way, elegant and simple, and models quantum behaviour better than an ad hoc set of modifications to classical theories.

One translation of Occam's Razor: "One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." More about O.R. here.

Why this happens, IMHO: Most people whom I see invoke O.R. are NOT knowledgeable on the topic at hand. Case in point - original article poster is the most knowledgeable on the topic at hand AND gave the actual explanation of how things happened. O.R. invoker was trying to explain what happened in a DIFFERENT way. I felt that the O.R. invoker CREATED unnecessary entities in his explanation of how the Dell postcard was 'really' sent to King George II.

Occam's Razor is not to be abused as a framework for the creation of a 'simpler' explanation that somehow must be correct because of its supposed simplicity.

That said, of course I myself created an unnecessary entity by explaining how most people who abuse O.R. are clueless about the topic at hand. With confidence I assume this, however, it is not necessarily so. However, after analyzing the 'simpler' explanation, I can with exacting hindsight conclude that they abused O.R.

In summary, I feel like Occam's Razor is often misused as a pseudo-scientific "God made it so". It's one of those theories that can be difficult to ignore when used properly, but rarely is it used properly.

congratulations, you've just discovered occam's razor.

"Antimatter/matter combustion, in fact, has the highest thrust/weight ratio theoretically possible given current physics."

Given current physics, yes. Just wait a while though, and we'll get Zero Point Energy working. Evidently there may be enough energy in a 1 cm^3 vacuum to boil all the worlds oceans. Much more energy than antimatter, and you don't have to take it with you, as vacuum is rather abundant. I believe that this energy source was featured in 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Here's something related, the Casimir Effect.

From the site:

Climate change is an irreversible, global and long-term environmental issue. Each molecule of greenhouse gas emitted locally will have an effect at the global scale which will mainly affect the children of your children. The importance of the climate change issue is often not well percieved by the public because of (i) its inherent intangible nature (global scale, long-term effect) and (ii) its strong scientific uncertainties which are often used to justify inaction (since public expects science to be exact). One of the ways to raise awareness in the public is therefore to use climate simulation.

...

Climate change is high in the political agenda. During the Earth summit in Rio (1992), 192 countries have signed a UN convention to protect our climate from human-induced activities (UNFCCC). In 1997, the parties to this convention met in Kyoto and drafted a protocol which legally binds developed countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Today, several countries such as USA, Japan, Australia refuse to ratify the protocol because they do not believe climate change is such a critical issue. Your result will help to make reliable predictions of climate change and to quantify uncertainties. This could help policy makers to assess the real risk of the effects of human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and to guide their decision. Imagine for example, that your simulation shows that with a doubling of CO2, a possible state of climate is a shut-down of the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic associated with strong climate change in the USA. This might act as a wake-up call on decision-makers ....

I have heavy doubts that these people are motivated purely by science. Did you see the opening animation? It does sound more like they want to demonstrate what they already believe is happening and what will happen, as opposed to coming into this with a clear mind. Personally, I like the idea of distributed computing solving problems like this. They say they're using a climate model developed by the Hadley Centre, which looks legitimate enough. But I remain skeptical, as you do.

From the site:

Climate change is an irreversible, global and long-term environmental issue. Each molecule of greenhouse gas emitted locally will have an effect at the global scale which will mainly affect the children of your children. The importance of the climate change issue is often not well percieved by the public because of (i) its inherent intangible nature (global scale, long-term effect) and (ii) its strong scientific uncertainties which are often used to justify inaction (since public expects science to be exact). One of the ways to raise awareness in the public is therefore to use climate simulation.

...

Climate change is high in the political agenda. During the Earth summit in Rio (1992), 192 countries have signed a UN convention to protect our climate from human-induced activities (UNFCCC). In 1997, the parties to this convention met in Kyoto and drafted a protocol which legally binds developed countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Today, several countries such as USA, Japan, Australia refuse to ratify the protocol because they do not believe climate change is such a critical issue. Your result will help to make reliable predictions of climate change and to quantify uncertainties. This could help policy makers to assess the real risk of the effects of human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and to guide their decision. Imagine for example, that your simulation shows that with a doubling of CO2, a possible state of climate is a shut-down of the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic associated with strong climate change in the USA. This might act as a wake-up call on decision-makers ....

I have heavy doubts that these people are motivated purely by science. Did you see the opening animation? It does sound more like they want to demonstrate what they already believe is happening and what will happen, as opposed to coming into this with a clear mind. Personally, I like the idea of distributed computing solving problems like this. They say they're using a climate model developed by the Hadley Centre, which looks legitimate enough. But I remain skeptical, as you do.

They're starting with different initial conditions and hoping that some subset results in 50 years of weather?

No. The term `starting conditions' appears in the BBC article, but if you go to the website it says:

The only systematic way to estimate future climate change is to run hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art climate models with slightly different physics in order to represent uncertainties.

In large-scale simulations such as these, there are often bits of physics/chemistry/weather that have to be put in by hand because, usually, the relevant bits of science would be too expensive to calculate, or couldn't be seen on the resolution of the simulation. While it's usually pretty doable to come up with reasonable models for the unresolved effects, there are often parameters in the models that could take a range of values.

This ensemble of models allows for the callibration of the model parameters against 50 years of data; this gives some confidence in the predictive power of the models for the next 50 years.

This sort of parameter estimation based on calibration is very common for models of complex systems, and not just for computer models. Ideally, one wants to get to the point where such things aren't necessary and you can directly calculate all the science a priori of course, but these model calibrations are often useful steps along the way.

To be able to install and run such simulation on your PC, we recommend the following minimum system specifications:

• Operating System: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, or Windows NT 4.0
• Processor: Athlon, PII, PIII, PIV
• Speed: Min 450MHz. Preferably 700+
• Memory: Min 128 MB at this stage. (64MB may be enough but we havn't tested) for use

On their FAQ (dated 5 Oct 2000!), they state they will support Linux initially and are looking for sponsorship to port the client to Windows. Considering the "What's New" page was last updated on 17 Aug 2001, the actual status of ports for different clients is unclear.

It seems like there is a bit of professional dueling going on between this project and Seti@home looking at their FAQ and the quote by Dr Meyers Allen saying about their project "It's not a stripped down 'toy' version, so the runs take time"

My favorite quote from their FAQ was in response to the possible affect the computers running the client might have on the environment:

"Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the Casino-21 project."

I'm not going to reprint the page
unless it get's slashdotted, but none of the models (HadAM3 ,HadSM3,HadCM3,HadCM3L)
in the simulation take into account the biological factor.

It has been said, that both termites, cars, factories, cows, and Taco
Bell produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas which do attribute to global
warming. How can this lead to an accurate prediction model if these factors
aren't accounted for?

However, it is correct to say that the proper acceleration of the travelling twin is what breaks the symmetry and allows him to come back younger. (Though it wouldn't be correct to say that acceleration is the only way to break the symmetry...)

Nothing is created or destroyed, at least I don't think we have found anything basic that is yet (matter, energy, etc). So far the universe has been pretty zero sum.

What about singularities (i.e. black holes)? (Interested readers see http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html #q1)

or...

If you believe in the ``Big Bang'' model as conventionally proposed (seems that the majority of non-Physics majors do) then how do you explain the presence of `dark matter' in the Universe? It had to come from somewhere and if it didn't exist before the Universe was created then, by definition, it had to be created afterwards. (Interested readers see http://hepwww.rl.ac.uk/ukdmc/dark_matter/galactic_ dm.html)

If assume that we understand most of the basic laws of physics and there isn't any possibility for "magic physics" such as subatomic engineering or faster-than-light travel, then one can predict what "advanced" intelligent technological civilizations may look like. At least some of them seem likely to be Matrioshka Brains. These would be very difficult to detect using our current technology because they radiate heat at close to the cosmic microwave background temperature. To look for signs of advanced technological civilizations we will need to do infrared surveys, something that was suggested by Freeman Dyson more than 40 years ago.

Another form they might take would be bacteria sized hive minds constructed using advanced molecular nanotechnology. In which case they could be all around us on Earth and we would never notice them. To look for those we need to start a program to develop highly parallel air, water and soil samplers that can detect micron and submicron sized bits of "technology".

Free your mind -- the rest will follow.

University of Illinois has a very good article (with pictures!) about Proton conduction, proton channels, proton wells on water.

This page about Victor Petrenko, a little more technical than Slashdot's article

This one is brief, but says: "PROTONIC CHIPS NEVER FORGET Researchers at the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the use of protonic memory for making cheap forget-me-not computer chips. In 1995, they noticed during experiments on silicon wafers that protons deep within the wafers were responding to electrical signals on the surface. "Nobody had seen these moving protons before," says one scientist. Further research showed the protons can be precisely controlled with standard microcircuits -- and are thus able to store data. Protonic chips won't need the fancy processing used in "flash" and other so-called nonvolatile memory chips, and can operate at very low power levels, thus prolonging battery life in laptops. Protonic chips currently are being tested at Texas Instruments.

This PDFexplains the Mechanism of proton diffusion in the solid state protonic conductor Rb3H(SeO4)2, wich I assume is somewhat equivalent to the ice (haven't read the whole article yet) This

Faster Than Light Transmission of Signals; also, Communication faster than Light

And a dissenting opinion

All the known things that go faster than light today

Gotta love Google!

What this says to me is that there is something smaller than the B meson and that the "positive" version is (now) much more prevalent than the "anti" version, such that anti-B mesons get annihilated in the sub-sub-atomic version of a matter-antimatter reaction faster than the B meson.

The experiment deals with decay, not annihilation. The B meson is made up of smaller particles, viz. a bottom quark and some other anti-quark (up, down, or strange); the B- meson is made up of an anti-bottom quark and some other quark. The other quarks (u, u-, d, d-, s, s-) are more stable than the bottom quarks; therefore, the decay of B and B- mesons is most likely caused by the decay of b and b- quarks (into charm and c- quarks). Seeing that B- mesons decay more quickly than B mesons, we infer that the b- quarks decay into c- quarks more quickly than b quarks decay into c quarks. That is, in this instance (as in the case of K mesons), the antimatter particle decays more rapidly than its matter counterpart. (We can't measure the decay rates of b and b- quarks directly because quarks are only observable in color-neutral particles, so we must observe these particles in their decay to determine the decay of these quarks.)

But as the experiment deals with decay, and not annihilation, the prevelance of one (matter/antimatter) over the other does not explain the results.

btw, here's a non-MSNBC article that deals with the issue. Here's a page that discusses the decay of b quarks in Bs (bottom-strange combination) mesons.

More specific info on the requirement for the Casino-21 pilot client are here. No *nix client so far: "The current plan is to begin with a rough Linux port for in-house testing and possibly an alpha-release version. Based on registration results so far, the next port would be to a Windows platform (98 or NT). "

If you're interested in lending a hand to such research into climate change, some folks at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory would appreciate your help with their Casino-21 distributed client. Its still in the preparatory stages (ie client comming soon), and requires a significant investment in terms of commitment as compared to such things as SETI@home: "Casino-21 client will most likely require at least 128MB of memory, and 500MB of free disk space".

If you're interested in lending a hand to such research into climate change, some folks at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory would appreciate your help with their Casino-21 distributed client. Its still in the preparatory stages (ie client comming soon), and requires a significant investment in terms of commitment as compared to such things as SETI@home: "Casino-21 client will most likely require at least 128MB of memory, and 500MB of free disk space".

If you're interested in lending a hand to such research into climate change, some folks at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory would appreciate your help with their Casino-21 distributed client. Its still in the preparatory stages (ie client comming soon), and requires a significant investment in terms of commitment as compared to such things as SETI@home: "Casino-21 client will most likely require at least 128MB of memory, and 500MB of free disk space".

---

In an accident of history, both of those movements were transformed in January 1984, and began having parallel but increasingly important effects on the world. That month, a new plan for handling DARPA net addresses was launched. Dreamed up by Vint Cerf, this plan was called the Internet Protocol, and required changing the addresses of every node on the network over to one of the new IP addresses, a unique, global, and numerical address. This was the birth of the Internet we have today.

I distinctly remember having to learn the IP stack in 1981. And isn't it Vince Cerf?

maybe they need a bigger computer


--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m

I participate in Seti@Home, it seems more valuable than distributed.net's offering. However, I can see much better uses for such projects. A while ago I heard of the Casino-21 project, which is about climatic modelling. I think that this is something very useful, valuable and important to us, and I wish they would get a move on and start up. The web site of note for this project is: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/. At this time you can only register your interest (I think that they're still in the planning phase.) I do recommend that people register as higher numbers might increase the chances of the project happening. Presumably registering will also sign you up for future announcements, such as when they have client software to download. Although they make comparisons to SETI@Home, I think they will operate slightly differently, with work units perhaps taking more than a year (one of the things that I think makes SETI@Home successful is that people get feedback via wu completion, and get to compete).

btw check out this distributed project: http://www.climate-dynam ics.rl.ac.uk/~hansen/casino21.html
it seems pretty cool, i have already signed...

Hello,
Sorry, my phrasing could have been clearer, I was also being slightly retorical.
However the people from Rutherford Appleton running the Casino-21 project, modeling the climate address this potential irony in their FAQ part of which I duplicate below:

Won't all these computers being left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the Climate System?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the Casino-21 project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of energy.

That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the Casino-21 project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea

Is 5,400,000 cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council , some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!

Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the Casino-21 project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.

Hello,
Sorry, my phrasing could have been clearer, I was also being slightly retorical.
However the people from Rutherford Appleton running the Casino-21 project, modeling the climate address this potential irony in their FAQ part of which I duplicate below:

Won't all these computers being left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the Climate System?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the Casino-21 project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of energy.

That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the Casino-21 project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea

Is 5,400,000 cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council , some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!

Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the Casino-21 project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.

or even better, IMO, the Casino-21 Climate Simulation Project.(once it gets underway of course.) Useful data would result, interesting question to be worked on, scientific; what more could you ask for in a distributed computing project?

While the local effects of cities on area weather patterns is interesting, especiaaly to it's residents, we should all be thinking about the global weather and what are collective cities are doing to change the way the planet functions. On that note I would like to put a plug in for The Casino-21 experiment they are hoping to use spare cycles; like Seti@Home or distributed.net to do global climate simulations. They are still in the preliminary stages, however it is a very noble goal. Last I knew they were looking for help coding some of the tools and applications neccessary; and I know that many of the /. readers are well versed in writing code, and many are kind enough to donate their services to projects like this.

At least we can run our own weather simulations at home with the Casino-21 project. How long until a distributed nuclear simulation project? I guess that wouldn't happen becuase of "security concerns," though.

Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.

There are possibly some applications that could be automated, such as building a complete two-point correlation function for the clustering of the objects in the field, or maybe trying to categorize all the objects by colour, redshift and position into groupings in space and colour. However, most of these tasks are doable in a reasonable amount of computing time - say two-weeks computation on an UltraSparc machine (although the two-point correlation function is an O(n^2) problem, that requires 10^16 comparisons at a rough estimate, with maybe 10^8 comparisons a second, that would require ... umm ... err ... about 3 years of CPU time). So yes - possibly an automated tool might well be worth it. I strongly suspect that few astronomers would bother to do the correlation function for the whole field at all scales, and would settle for looking at the function for scales up to around 4 degrees separation on the sky (that's much bigger than the largest known cluster of galaxies).

However, looking at the automatically processed picture strips, I see all sorts of problems with background level correction (the background appears to be wavey in these pictures so there is definitely room for improvement). Modern astronomical analysis often requires significant time spent on looking at a particular frame of interest - I spent over a year examining and refining an image of a pair of Quasars as part of my thesis - so my feeling is that there is much to be gained by picking an object which interests you, possibly from a Radio or X-ray survey, and following it up with the SDSS survey here. With this much data I think you can be assured that the Astronomy community will get to grips with the important statistical analysis on it's own. What it won't be able to do is follow up every field, every interesting quasar or galaxy and really really work on it. It may be possible to see gravitational lensing (although it won't be very clear since the point spread function will be around an arcsec) or do some funky image processing to try and deconvolve the images to recover more detail. In fact, there are lots of things to play with which are unlikely to ever get done on every part of this image data, so grab yourself a copy of IRAF or Source Extractor and go play.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

--

I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.

Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.

Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?

I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.

Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.

Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?

The URL for the Climate Dynamics Home Page is: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/

I think the main point is that it's better than the nothing that those cycles would otherwise be doing. Slashdot did have an article on the Casino 21 project at one point. When / if it starts up, it will use distributed clients to run climate simulations. Check it out.

Cracking codes doesn't really accomplish anything more than proving a point. (Unless you're a government - but since WWII, government codebreakers are mostly the bad guys).

Yes, OGR's actually have some practical use. However, they're only the optimal case of Golomb Rulers, and it's pretty easy to find near-optimal ones - only a couple percent off, at worst. Worse, for any given application, the number of marks that is desirable is bound to increase linearly. Any non-QC method of finding them will fall behind over time, even supercharged by Moore's law. (And the problem with the quantum solution is that it doesn't distribute. 2 128 bit QC's FullOn3d claims. Also, until they have an algorithm that would spot the earth, the chances are miniscule.)

Then there's Casino 21. Cooler graphics, actually useful. On the down side, it's vaporware (no pun intended) and it requires more serious hardware.

O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O
But really, if any of this stuff gets you to leave the computer on overnight when you wouldn't otherwise, it's doing more harm than good.
O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O

(although I'm kinda waiting for the day when you can use spare cycles to stress-test beta software. The only problem with that idea currently is that bad software will more often than not bring down your OS with it. At least, with most OS's :)

• SETI@home : a neat, geek-friendly, worthy cause, but hardly practical, and they have plenty of CPU - they don't need mine. This project is currently running, and while they had growing pains a while ago, they have been solved. One problem remains (as far as I know); they client still slows to 1/3 speed if you have the visuals turned on.
• distributed.net encryption cracks : for a long time, the most practical distributed computing projects around, and certainly the most advanced, but I think that they (and others) have clearly proven the point re: encryption (i.e. that we need access to stronger encryption), and while we don't have perfect regulations, one more crack ain't gonna do it. These are also running, and have been for years now. They had some problems with stats a while ago, but they haven't had a problem of not sending out new work in a long time (if ever).
• d.net's OGR project : good scientific research, certainly, but really, just giving some grad student thesis fodder. You're not gonna solve world hunger or anything. Also, it isn't running yet.
• Casino-21 Project : wow, some practical application. Also very different from other projects, because it is devoted not to "solving a riddle", but to predicting a complex system. Of course, it's not running yet, either.

-Yoshi

This is usually up-to-date (within a week). Try http://ast.star.rl.ac.uk/darwin/planets/ .

It contains more useful information than most of the other extra-solar planet pages I've seen.