Guru Mountain's Distributed Computing Team was formed in April of 2006 as a means for us to put some of our computing power to work for humanitarian causes and the advancement of scientific knowledge.

This rewarding hobby is something that anyone with a personal computer can get involved with, takes up very little of your time, and costs you practically nothing. The software runs in the background on your computer, and can be set to pause its work whenever you are using the mouse or keyboard.

There are dozens of projects, covering everything from searching for intelligent life and spinning neutron stars, solving protein folding problems that may lead to new disease cures, discovering new prime numbers and other mathematical research, rendering animations and even building a complex distributed chess game.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are involved with distributed computing, with tens of thousands of teams participating. Joining a team provides a sense of community, and there is some friendly competition between teams to earn credits and rise in the rankings. Our fairly new, small team is doing quite well so far, and we hope that you'll consider us when you choose a team to join.

Building or leasing time on a supercomputer is very, very expensive. Many scientific researchers simply don't have the resources to do this, and a lot of research requires massive amounts of computing power. Distributed computing uses thousands of computers around the world to accomplish what most supercomputers can't even do. The servers running the projects send out pieces of work, called a work unit (or WU) to each computer, which crunches or processes the WU and returns the results to the server.

These results are checked and stored in a database on the servers, then further processed and analyzed by the researchers. The tens of thousands of computers, most of them ordinary home personal computers, can do as much or more work than any huge supercomputer.

By donating computer resources to these projects, you allow students, researchers and scientists to use a couple of fairly inexpensive database and web servers to create a giant supercomputer that can perform vast amounts of the otherwise very tedious, expensive and time consuming processing of data.

We've tried to make our site a good place to get the information you need to get started with distributed computing. We have information resources, links, a site news weblog and discussion forums to help you get involved with a minimum of headaches.

The sense of community afforded by a distributed computing team is of more importance to us than the competitive aspects, and we enjoy the satisfaction of doing something worthwhile with our idle computer resources. We've tried to make the site reflect this, so look around and feel free to ask questions. Sure, we'd like you to join our team, but what we really want is for you to get involved with distributed computing regardless of which team you choose.

Have a look around our site, visit the forums and weblog, and get involved!