CPU scavenging
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CPU-scavenging or cycle-scavenging is a subset of distributed computing that harnesses unused PC resources worldwide, generally for research aims at night, weekends, and other idle times. This technique is also known as shared computing, cycle stealing, or grid computing.
This type of computing was popularized beginning in 1997 by distributed.net and later in 1999 by SETI@home to harness the power of networked PCs worldwide, in order to solve CPU-intensive research problems.
CPU-scavenging systems typically gain and lose machines at unpredictable times as interactive users start or stop using their machines, new machines are purchased, machines are removed from the network, or break down. CPU-scavengers move jobs from machine to machine as necessary to allow the smooth running of the job and the network being scavenged.
[edit] Current projects
Currently many CPU-scavenging projects exist.
The best-known cycle scavenging computation is SETI@home, currently the largest computation on the planet. SETI@home was using more than 3 million computers to achieve 23.37 sustained teraflops (979 lifetime teraflops) as of September 2001 [1].
As of May 2005, Folding@home had achieved peaks of 186 teraflops on over 160,000 machines.
Another well-known project is distributed.net, which was started in 1997 and has run a number of successful projects in its history.
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility (NAS) has run genetic algorithms using the Condor cycle scavenger running on about 350 Sun and SGI workstations.
United Devices operates the United Devices Cancer Research Project based on its Grid MP product, which cycle scavenges on volunteer PCs connected to the Internet. As of June 2005, the Grid MP ran on about 3,100,000 machines [2].
Parabon Computation provides services similar to United Devices, but claims that it is safer to the machines from which the cycles are scavenged as Parabon's client software operates within a Java sandbox.
