Distributed processing

Abstract

The previous chapter covered running processing on a local machine within a multitasking environment. With the advent of networking and the Internet, it is now possible to distribute processing over a network. An extreme example involves The National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, England. They are working on a project that uses the CPU time of users on the Internet, when a registered computer uses their screen saver (http://www.ud.com). The program that runs on the computer is one that searches for new drugs in the treatment of cancer. By July 2001, this program had achieved 213,568,434 hours of CPU time using over 760,000 devices. This has achieved one of the world’s largest computers. Most people understand the concept of not using up available local memory, or disk resources, or even network capacity, but one of the largest underutilized resources is CPU time. Many computers, especially in the office, lie idle for many hours in the day. These computers could easily be performing other tasks, such as providing solutions to state-of-the- art research projects.