WARNING: Dabbling in maths can get you into serious trouble. Ask Aaron
Blosser, the Denver-based computer expert whose attempt to enlist the aid of
some 2500 PCs in a quest for previously unknown prime numbers went horribly wrong
(see p 5).
Blosser鈥檚 aim was to scavenge some of the network鈥檚 vast processing power,
which would otherwise go to waste. In an era in which police teams regularly
organise dawn swoops on Internet pornography rings, that ambition seems almost
noble in its innocence. Unfortunately for Blosser, US West, the telecoms company
whose network he targeted, doesn鈥檛 quite see it that way. A prosecution is on
the cards, perhaps even a prison sentence.
US West is not being entirely unreasonable. A telecoms company that makes
light of people parasitising its networks may be putting the confidence of its
customers and investors at risk.
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But that shouldn鈥檛 be the whole story, because Blosser鈥檚 illicit activities
have inadvertently highlighted a business opportunity. Think about it. Most
desktop computers spend the majority of their time doing little more than
running screen savers or, on a busy day, word processing packages that seldom
require the processor to execute more than a handful of instructions per second.
They are not just underused. They鈥檙e scarcely used at all. Wouldn鈥檛 it be a
smart idea to recover some of this processing power?
Some people are already doing just that. Since the 1970s many university
researchers have run programs that roam their departmental networks looking for
spare processing capacity that can be put to work on number-crunching problems.
More recently, number enthusiasts have been linking up via the Internet to form
鈥渄istributed computing鈥� collectives.
These groups have been spectacularly successful in using their spare computer
cycles to do calculations that were once the preserve of
supercomputers鈥攄etermining p to the five-trillionth decimal place, for
example. And soon idle computer time may be enlisted in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
(see 鈥淪tars in their eyes鈥�, New 杏吧原创, 4 July, p 40).
So far, people have been donating their idle computer time free of charge. As
the Internet grows, however, entrepreneurs may come onto the scene, selling job
lots of spare computer cycles to companies and researchers in need of additional
number-crunching power, and paying a fee to the people with cycles to spare.
We could end up with a new commodity to trade. And not before time. In terms
of brute-force processing power, the Internet is already equivalent to 20 000
supercomputers. It鈥檚 in nobody鈥檚 interests for such a behemoth to stand idle.
Blosser鈥檚 passion for discovering prime numbers may have backfired, but his
instincts about waste are spot-on.
