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SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was the first popular distributed computing scheme, letting "just anyone" help do the massive crunching of data to help solve a big problem. Pretty cool, but these days the idea has been greatly expanded. The mission of the World Community Grid is to tackle other big data projects that benefit humanity, such as helping to cure Muscular Dystrophy and cancer. You load a piece of software on your computer and register it. The WCG then feeds out some data that needs processing to your computer, which works on the problem when it would otherwise be idle (for example: do you leave your computer on all day -- or all night?) Maybe your computer will be the one that finds a breakthrough that defeats AIDS. Cooooooooool. From This is True for 25 March 2007 Suggestions for further reading:
 by David B. Kirk, Wen-mei W. Hwu Amazon Price: $62.95 Customer Review: As a beginning text this book has a significant advantage that beginning texts written for MPI, OpenMP, and so on don't have: there are 200 million CUDA-capable GPUs already deployed, and the odds are pretty good that most readers either have, or can...  by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea Amazon Price: $37.79 Customer Review: This book is really great. It briefly explains basics while not stick to them, continues with useful hi-api classes for everyday usage and ends with advanced topics.. There are many examples of good and bad concurrency snippets which makes things eve...  by Tom White Amazon Price: $29.69 Customer Review: Tom White certainly writes very well: this book is very readable. It is also quite comprehensive, falling somewhere between a tutorial and a reference. That being said, I was ultimately rather disappointed. First, and most importantly, i...  by George Reese Amazon Price: $19.79 Customer Review: Book provides a good overview of cloud architectures and best practices, with a slant towards architecting transactional web-based systems for security, failure recovery, and so on. Heavy emphasis on Amazon S3, EC2 and related offerings, so if you ar...  by Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit Amazon Price: $41.25 Customer Review: What this book is not: - A programmer's cookbook - A programming manual - A math text This is an engineering theory textbook: enough theory to teach you how to reason about practical problems on the problems' own terms.... Newsfeed display by CaRP |
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