Juno to Turn User Base into World's Fastest Supercomputer for Bioinformatics

J.W. Bizzaro • March 14, 2001

Juno to Turn User Base into World's Fastest Supercomputer for Bioinformatics

``Juno Online Services, Inc. today [Feb. 1] announced the establishment of the Juno Virtual Supercomputer Project, a distributed computing effort of unprecedented scope that aims to harness unused processing power associated with the free portion of its subscriber base in order to execute computationally intensive biomedical and other applications on behalf of commercial clients and research institutions.

``Juno is one of the nation's largest Internet access providers, with 14.2 million total registered subscribers and 4.0 million active subscribers in December 2000. While the personal computers owned by different Juno subscribers have different performance characteristics, preliminary studies recently completed by the company suggest that if the computers of all of Juno's active free subscriber base were simultaneously working on a single computational problem, they would together represent the world's fastest supercomputer (measured in terms of aggregate instructions per second), and might approach or break the `petahertz barrier' (with a hypothetical effective processor speed on the order of a billion megahertz). Although the achievable effective computing power (and the level of any associated revenues) are likely to be significantly lower in practice for a variety of reasons, Juno's management believes that the unused computing power of its free subscriber base represents a potentially valuable asset from the viewpoint of both potential revenue generation and potential contribution to society.

``The company expects to focus particular attention on prospective clients involved in bioinformatics research who are beginning to confront such computationally demanding applications as the determination of the structure of proteins encoded by gene sequences discovered through recently completed efforts to sequence the human genome, and searching through millions of `virtual molecules' to find promising candidates for new pharmaceutical products....''

Press release:
http://www.juno.com/corp/news/supercomputer.html

It would be great if the service were pro bono for academe or ``research institutions'', but there is no indication of that.

Discussion forums: Juno to Turn User Base into World's Fastest Supercomputer for Bioinformatics

Expanded view | Monitor forum | Save place

Start a new thread:

You have to be to post a reply.