X-no-Archive:yes
I ran into a reference to a company that is providing a Java applet / client
called "Pioneer" to run during unused PC time (with Linux, Mac, and UNIX
clients in development - I wonder if they would consider MPE/iX?), and
claims that they will some day pay for the unused time, although even they
do not seem to be sure how they will do this, and I cannot imagine a scheme
so far as not to upset someone (per unit of work completed seems obvious to
me, but is not what they propose). I have only this weekend downloaded and
installed the client, and have little to say about it, except that it
certainly doesn't seem to affect my use of the PC or to interfere with the
SETI@Home client, although I have also not yet been able to tell whether or
not it has done any work.

It appears to be a joint effort between Parabon Computing and their clients
who are doing research, such as "Compute Against Cancer SM", to "help...
researchers understand and reduce the side effects of chemotherapy by
analyzing massive amounts of data". One address is http://www.parabon.com.
Should this be successful, and should they start paying participants, I hold
no hope that future efforts will be limited to such charitable or
compassionate concerns, or that their customers will all be underfunded
research organizations.

Others have posted information on efforts other than SETI@Home, such as
http://www.distributed.net/. The observation that PCs go unused for the
greater part of their time and represent a wasted resource is one that I had
heard about a decade ago, and the idea of finding a way to use them stayed
with me (not that I've done anything with that idea). SETI@Home is primarily
of interest to me because it does just this, and the possibility that they
will learn something interesting out of the exercise is second to that,
separate from their stated goals.

The first company I worked for out of college performed their batch
processing on PCs during their second and third shifts (an interesting
choice, to be sure), and that cemented the idea in my mind. I would later
rework their telecommunications polling to be controlled by a server program
on one PC, and modified the telecommunication software to talk to this
server to return results and get its next task. It all seemed the obvious
way to do things at the time, solving some unpleasant problems with their
previous approach. I wonder if other businesses are trying such an approach.


Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com