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Canada to Launch Countrywide Virtual SuperComputer
LadyCatra writes "A serious shortage of world-class computing power in Canada prompted University of Alberta scientists to create the next best thing -- a countrywide, virtual supercomputer.
On Nov. 4, thousands of computers from research centres across the country will be strung together by a U of A effort to create the most powerful computer in this country.
The full story is here"
Not all CPUs power down when being idle. Most OSs has an idle task, burning away computer power in an endless loop.
When usage is 50%, the CPU is probably not turned off at all, since turning on and off clock trees (and getting the PLLs to sync) take time.
Since most home computers will not power down, we can use that potential computer power to save energy by not running super computers elsewhere.
"Exactly what are you selling?"
I'd like to suggest something like the JavaVM, i.e. a standard virtual machine, from which you buy and sell basic ops, i.e. a byte-code instruction.
The biggest problem will probably be that you will not make any real money from letting your CPU be used. Perhaps a good idea would be to let a university supply you with internet access in exchange for CPU time. They usually have quite alot of bandwith.
As many of the other posters have pointed out, this work isn't necessarily new, but it is news.
There are other tools out there which do this: Legion, Avaki, Sun Grid Engine, Globus, to name a few but the goal is to create a network of (mostly) supercomputers which doesn't require a lot of reconfiguration at each site. What differentiates this work from many other approaches is that it is transparent to the system administrator.
For those who ask "why can't you just do something let seti@home" the answer is that not all problems in science and business can be easily decomposed into small chunks. Bandwidth requirements and latency may also be a problem. A lot of scientific programmers have to worry about communications much more than about processing power (although this tradeoff has been seesawing backwards and forwards with new advances in both technologies).
There's a worldwide effort through both business and academia to create a number of good, interoperating frameworks for doing this sort of transient, virtualised supercomputer.
Have a look at the Global Grid Forum (which is becoming the focus for Grid computing standards) for more information.