Internet supercomputing is in its infancy, but it holds a lot of potential for the future of computers and science. The basic concept is that rather than physically building a large-scale computer, you can create one that could outperform the world's most powerful supercomputers using the Web, by harnessing the wasted power of the millions of desktop computers worldwide. One of the first organisations to put the theory into practice was the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative at the University of California's Berkeley campus. It dreamt up SETI@home, a screen saver, that searches for patterns in radio signals from outer space while your PC is in sleep mode. Data packets from a radio telescope are beamed over the Internet to a participating desktop computer. When the user takes a break, the SETI screen saver activates the analysis software, sending results back for correlation. The organisers at Berkeley thought they'd sign up around 150,000 people; today more than ten times that number are already participating and, at any given moment, around half a million machines are crunching away at the data.
Other companies are looking at a more commercial operation, offering air miles, online discounts and even payment for the privilege of using spare computing capacity. Parabon, Distributed Science and Popular Power are three organisations which are looking at this opportunity and are offering a scheme where users download software to work on scientific research in reward for payment to themselves or their favourite charity. At a higher level, supercomputers at academic institutions have been hooked together in a grid in order to tackle major problems.
There's no doubt that supercomputers have played and will continue to play a pivotal role in the development of ground-breaking scientific research. In fact, without them it certainly would never have been possible. But in the future, the size and form of these devices is more likely to be a collection of disparate, off-the-shelf hardware connected via the Internet than the kind of large-scale devices we associate with supercomputers today. With the advent of the net, processing will be distributed globally, providing that the tasks can be broken up into small independent units.
Who knows, maybe your humble PC could form part of the net supercomputer that helps unlock the remaining secrets of the human genome.