This may sound odd, but ........

[Dyan]

I'm not sure where else to ask, so I apologize if this isn't the right forum......... Has anyone heard of this? http://www.grid.org/home.htm

It claims that it "The Grid MP Global @ grid.org is a virtual supercomputer that can be harnessed to power computational research and analysis projects on a massive scale. By combining millions of online CPUs worldwide to work on extremely large
computational projects, problems can be solved more quickly and less expensively than by conventional methods. Now any
networked computer can help fuel research and projects that previously may have required a bank of supercomputers or a
hundred years to complete."

I've never heard of such a thing and have a feeling that there's something not right here. So can anyone give me some guidence or information. I'm not joining it, but many of my friends are and I hate to see them hurt if it is a scam.

Thanks!

[oracleguy]

It is a concept called "Distributed Computing" it isn't a widely accepted idea. But think about it, in the millions of offices buildings worldwide there are billions of computers that for the most part sit idle during the night. But with distributed computing, all those computers can work a small fraction of a much larger problem.

There are several other organizations that do this. Folding@Home is another one but there are quite a few.

I don't know if you have ever used Adobe Premiere but it uses this concept, it allows multiple computers on the network work together to reduce the time it takes to render a movie.

See: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Computer_Science/Distributed_Computing/Projects/?il=1