Supercomputing at your fingertips...for free!

    Every parent has to instruct their children to share, specially when there are limited resources.   Not everyone can afford a $9,000 rocking horse, a $26,000 teddy bear, or a $50,000 Robby the Robot. The same rule is particularly true for supercomputing power and limited university resources. The recent leader has been the BlueGene/L system operating a 70.7 teraflop for $100 million.  This equals 1/6 of the operational budget of the University of Puerto Rico (2002-$677M).  A more feasible manner for Puerto Rican and Latin American researchers to use computing power is via the internet or ethernet using computer cluster programming.  Some of these programs include. Charles Parnot of the Molecular and Cellular Physiology Department (Stanford) began his project utilizing Xgrid (Apple Co.)  In one year, the number of computers voluntarily added to the project grew from 8 in march 2004 to 200, growing from 4 GHZ to 200 GHZ--all free.  These type of programs work as the recognized program SETI from the University of California (Berkeley) or Folding of Stanford University.   These systems are also being used to fight diseases such as malaria and AIDS. (To obtain a list, press here.) The advantage of Xgrid is its simplicity, which can also be used for more common non-science specific programs.  The user simply downloads the screen-saver.  Whenever they are not using their computer, the screen-saver kicks in, activating the computer for the project.  With these programs, scientific centers with limited resources can now obtain supercomputer power worth $100M...well almost.