I stand behind my assertion that the project described in the article about "420 years of computing" is not running on the same kind of system that folding at home is running on. The two wikipedia links are fairly clear and the system described in the original article is not the same as that used by folding at home.
Gil
I think you are confusing grids with distributed peer-to-peer computing networks. Grids are formed of (usually) clusters of nodes, usually running Linux. They are designed for problems that require massive amounts of computation, often involving multiple cooperation nodes running in parallel, and normally amounts of data so large that it is simpler to send the programs to a cluster near the data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
Shared processing systems a la seti or BOINC are loosely coupled systems where a modest amount of CPU power running a fairly small set of data is contributed to a larger project. In a grid system the users are normally researchers at universities or research institutions and the ownership of the IP is fairly clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand behind my assertion that the project described in the article about "420 years of computing" is not running on the same kind of system that folding at home is running on. The two wikipedia links are fairly clear and the system described in the original article is not the same as that used by folding at home. Gil
Much of this discussion is totally misdirected because the writers are confusing a distributed computing project like SETI or BOINC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_client-server_t echnology - with a grid system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing. They are completely different things.
I think you are confusing grids with distributed peer-to-peer computing networks. Grids are formed of (usually) clusters of nodes, usually running Linux. They are designed for problems that require massive amounts of computation, often involving multiple cooperation nodes running in parallel, and normally amounts of data so large that it is simpler to send the programs to a cluster near the data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing Shared processing systems a la seti or BOINC are loosely coupled systems where a modest amount of CPU power running a fairly small set of data is contributed to a larger project. In a grid system the users are normally researchers at universities or research institutions and the ownership of the IP is fairly clear.