Borrowing Computing Power

[Bruce Marshall]

On Wednesday 20 June 2007, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Thank you, but, that was for compiling jobs only. Can it be done for any
> > job? As if the desktop would now become an extended system, with the
> > resources of the laptop added to it. Like, when I mount the laptop (did
> > it one time on SuSE with fuse and sshfs) on a particular mount point,
> > the HD space gets added up, can it be done for the resources too?
>
> The short answer is "yes".  The much longer answer is "not really" :-)
>
> BOINC shares many home computers for scientific projects, but it requires
> the application to be written specifically to use BOINC.
>
> Google for "Linux grid computing".  There's a lot of work being done, but I
> don't know that any of it is useful in the way you want, yet.

I would disagree with the above and reverse it:   the short answer is NO.

BOINC parcels out pieces of 'work'  and no two  computers are working on the 
same piece of the puzzle.

The problem is that any process which is going to use more than one computer 
(as opposed to  more than one cpu)  would have to be written specifically to 
parcel out chunks of the work.  This is not a normal thing in my opinion and 
for a normal user wouldn't provide any benefit.   Large scientific projects 
like Setiathome and some medical projects which need lots of computer power 
can justify the time and effort involved.