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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

Supercomputers are so easy to make these

Supercomputers are so easy to make these days that you can just invite a bunch of people to bring their laptops to a gymnasium and hook them all together.

Reader comments

Kip IngramFeb 23, 2004 at 11:34AM

You can even dispense with the gym and just hook them all together over the web. The SETI@Home project does that.

I envision a future in which we get discounts on our internet service if we provide CPU cycles or storage. By slicing computations and files up into small enough pieces and using encryption appropriately we'll be able to run computations on each other's machines and store files on each other's drives without any privacy concerns. Such a system will be very fault tolerant against individual hard drive crashes and resistant to denial of service attacks too.

This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.