Your computer has a precious resource: downtime. Now two ‘internet computing’ schemes plan to turn your CPU’s idle minutes into

cash in your pocket…IBM’s ‘Blue Gene’ project, which will one day become the world’s largest individual computer with 1 petaflop of power, won’t be complete until 2005. But, say internet computing advocates, sharing power between computers connected the the net offers more computational power than the Blue Gene ever will - today. ‘Up to 90% of the time computers are on, they are idle - that is, not engaged in active computing tasks,’ says a representative from Parabon computation, which is rolling out a version of the scheme. ‘Worldwide, there are approximately 200 million computer users with Internet access. A conservative estimate puts this untapped computing power at 2 petaflops, 1000 times more powerful than the two fastest computers in the world today combined.’ The essence of the idea is to use your computer when you’re not, in order to process tiny segments of huge jobs which would normally require the attentions of a supercomputer. Jobs are sent to your machine via the net and then sent back when they’re complete. You don’t need to be connected to the net for the entire period of the calculation. Another company forging ahead with the idea is ProcessTree, which is using a multi-level marketing scheme to encourage users to devote their spare computing power (or ‘compute’) to paid work from third party companies. ProcessTree, which currently has 34681 partners and 67654 computers in its network, expects to launch a get-paid-for-your-compute scheme soon. It says you could expect to cover the cost of your Internet connection by helping it to process jobs ranging from video-editing to cryptography. Although neither of the networks are paying right now, both say they’ll be doing so in the near future. This, of course, will depend on whether they can find anyone who will trust a distributed network of hundreds of thousands of computers to do their private, high-priority processing tasks. The jury’s out on that one - but you could still go take a look at the idea. Might just pay for your spanking new ADSL connection, who knows? And no, before you ask - we’re NOT affiliates. Check the URL if you don’t believe us. ProcessTree: www.processtree.com

Parabon: www.parabon.com