PC Synergy

Private business considers ways to emulate SETI-like CPU sharing

By Don Tapscott

There's no bigger slouch in any home or office than a personal computer. It typically sits idle, and simple tasks such as memo writing or Internet surfing consume just a small fraction of the CPU's power. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on all the computers around the world, much of this investment is completely squandered.

But thanks to the Internet, soon all may not be lost. Government agencies are developing tools to harness the planet's raw computing power to accelerate progress in areas such as science and medicine. Corporations are trying to devise business models that lash together millions of personal computers to generate a profit.

The concept is simple. Break a mammoth computing project into millions of bite-sized pieces and farm them out to Internet-linked personal computers around the world. The computers chew through the problem whenever they aren't busy with their normal day-to-day tasks.

The biggest and highest-profile project of this ilk is SETI@home. It uses surplus computing power to analyze radio waves from outer space for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

More than 2.5 million computer owners currently participate with virtually no effort on their part. They download a SETI screensaver, and when the screensaver activates it begins crunching the data. The computer doesn't need a constant Internet connection; it takes only about five minutes to download enough data to keep the computer in cud-chewing mode for a couple of days.

The aggregate data-crunching power of SETI's volunteer computers trumps the most powerful supercomputer on earth - IBM's ASCI White, which is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS (trillions of operations per second) and cost $110 million. SETI@home hums along at 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500,000 so far.

For all its power, SETI is primitive. The donated computer resource is a one-way street; people who offer their computer time can't tap into SETI's power to perform their own tasks.

The Grid Forum project in Europe intends to correct this deficiency. When completed in 2004, it will create a virtual supercomputer by bringing together the computing power belonging to scientists around the world. Those who donate the computer power can also use the system to do their own work.

Back to Basics

The SETI and Grid projects may seem innovative and unprecedented, but they're not. Linking computers together to share resources was the Internet's original raison d'etre, back when the Net's only users were academia, government, and the military.

While a Web site such as Amazon typifies the Internet today, its model of a massive centralized database pumping information to millions of users is really a corruption of the Internet's early principles.

Sensing an opportunity, companies are now scrambling to develop business models where SETI-like commercial projects would reward contributors for the use of their computers and generate a profit for the orchestrating company.

The market for such data crunching is large. The creators of the animated movie Toy Story used 117 multiprocessor Sun Sparc workstations working around the clock for more than nine months to generate the film's images. The SETI setup could have done the task in seven hours.

Juno Online Services is one of the United States' largest Internet service providers, with four million active users. Juno offers a basic level of service at no charge if subscribers agree to download and view advertisements. Juno is considering forcing these no-charge subscribers to donate their idle processing power. The company estimates that its free subscribers theoretically could generate a supercomputer with one billion megahertz of power.

Another company in this market is United Devices, which attracts participants by offering work on the human genome project or fighting cancer. A current project runs under the aegis of the National Foundation for Cancer Research and evaluates the cancer-fighting potential of hundreds of millions of different molecules. The task requires an estimated 24 million hours of desktop computer time.

After being attracted by this worthy cause, PC owners are asked if a percentage of their volunteered computing power can be applied to profit-making projects. To encourage participation, the company runs a lottery with prizes such as sports cars. The more commercial work you allow your computer to do, the greater your chances of winning.

For a PC owner, this is a win-win deal. You can donate a resource that would otherwise be useless to you, participate in a noble cause, and maybe drive away with a new car.

United Devices executive Andy Price notes: "We believe that anything is possible. At some point, computation will probably become a commodity, especially as more and more machines are connected to the Internet. Until then, however, each company in this space will compete to gather as many members as possible."

Appealing to the Masses

The successful for-profit projects in the near future will blend both tangible and intangible value to its participants. For United Devices and others, drug companies offer a natural stepping-stone toward a commercially viable model from the early altruistic projects. They have similar computational requirements, deep pockets, and offer some "feel-good" benefits. If developing new drugs is insufficient incentive for a PC owner to join the network, drug companies might offer to offset current drug costs in Africa.

Animation studios could offer non-cash incentives such as early previews of the film or souvenir copies of the frames a PC owner "created." This idea could be extended to brand and relationship building in a variety of companies, actively engaging interested consumers in designing a new product.

When the Internet was just taking off, I wrote in The Digital Economy (McGraw Hill, 1995): "In the past, scientists would work with a powerful supercomputer to, say, simulate mechanisms of a biological cell membrane as a way of understanding the structure of biological molecules. But as networking permeates the planet, computers everywhere can be marshaled concurrently to attack the problem. The network becomes the computer - infinitely more powerful than any single machine. The same networking can be applied to business and almost every other aspect of human endeavor - learning, healthcare, work, entertainment."

This vision is now a reality. The network has become a computer. Imagine the possibilities.

Don Tapscott, [dtapscott@itemus.com], is chair of itemus inc. (www.itemus.com) and coauthor of Digital Capital (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).