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, climate prediction modeling, prairie restoration and quantum computer modeling, 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.

FEATURED PROJECT QMC@Home is designed to further develop the Quantum Monte Carlo method for general use in Quantum Chemistry, the science that invents smart approximations to Quantum Theory in order to predict molecular information with high accuracy. The ability to make accurate predictions about the reactions between molecules is of great importance to many aspects of science, and could impact our lives greatly. The vastly complex equations of Quantum Theory become a problem as system size increases, as with virtually all molecules of interest to chemistry and the life sciences. A major advantage of QMC is the ability to perform massively parallel calculations, which can be utilized to greatly increase the size and number of calculable systems by spreading the work out over many thousands of processors. This is something that distributed computing can do. By using thousands of internet-connected office and home computers, which have increased dramatically in terms of processing power and speed, projects like this one can have access to the kind of computing power that only the largest of supercomputers were capable of doing in the past.

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.