Mass Grid Computing Around the Corner?

zoglmannk asks: "I've become interested in grid computing. A lot has happened since the last time that I looked at it several years ago during the SETI@home heyday. Now several public supported grid applications are coming to fruit: climate modeling, cancer research, protein folding, smallpox therapies, fighting bioterrorism, mersenne prime search, evolution, SETI, and others. All of these have public interest to make a better world. Is mass adoption of public interest grid computing just around the corner? Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs? What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?"

Comments

An easy reward...

[WordODD]

Most of these projects allow you to join teams and obtain stats based on your computer's performance and the performance of your team as a whole. The collection of these stats seems to be a successful method of motivating and rewarding the participants and best of all it takes minimal time, effort and almost no other resources away from the main project.

Distributed != Grid

[Anonymous Coward]

Grid computing is not the same thing as distributed computing. You are talking about distributed computing.

Here is a pdf describing what grid computing is.