What is distributed computing?
Originally posted on Jan 12 2004 by Support 1 Distributed Computing involves using computers from around the world to run calculations, simulations etc. Projects such as Seti, Folding, and others use spare computer cycles to run calculations and simulations to further their knowledge and research. Users can help by installing a program onto their computer that will download data and then use spare cpu cycles to run the calculations. The results are then fed back up to the computers at the main project site. Researchers can then use the results to further their knowledge. There are many projects that utilize this technique, a few of which are described below. Folding Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Folding@Home uses novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allows Folding@Hom
