Date: 04/08/2009

Intel's new idea to tap severely unused processing power

Do you own SUV car to drive to your office? Why not car-pool to reduce pollution. Intel is advising similar concept for underutilized PCs.

Activities like document viewing/editing, net surfing and any such home PC activities need little quantity of processing power from multi-core processor based PCs with Intel and AMD microprocessors. There is lot of unutilized processing power particularly in home PCs.

Intel novel idea is to run some complex research software programs for inventing solutions for world's environment and health problems on under-utilized PCs. This new initiation by Intel and its partners is aimed to find cures for cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer's.

The new program called Progress Thru Processors, a new volunteer computing application built on the Facebook platform that allows people to donate their PCs' unused processor power to research projects such as Rosetta@home.

In addition to Rosetta@home, Progress Thru Processors participants can choose to contribute excess processor computing power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net and Africa@home. Climateprediction.net is dedicated to increased understanding of global climate change by predicting the Earth's climate and testing the accuracy of climate models. Africa@home is currently focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new anti-malarial drugs and vaccines.

"In the same spirit as Intel's Small Things Challenge, Progress Thru Processors underscores our belief that small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world," said Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager, Corporate Marketing Group. "By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place."

Launched today as a public beta and available to all Facebook users at www.facebook.com/progressthruprocessors, the application automatically directs a computer's idle processor power to fuel researchers' computational efforts. The application will activate only when a PC's performance is not being fully utilized. When the participant's computer usage demands more processor performance, the application defers and sits idle until spare processing capabilities become available again.


"The social and scientific utility of volunteer computing is a function of the number of participants - the more people we sign up, the greater the good we can collectively do," said Matt Blumberg, executive director of GridRepublic. "We're optimistic that the combination of the Facebook platform and Intel's global reach will help bring large numbers of new people into volunteer computing, enabling research and discovery which would otherwise be impossible."

Progress Thru Processors was developed in collaboration with the National Science Foundation-funded BOINC project at the University of California, Berkeley. Marketing and creative for Progress Thru Processors was provided by noise, a New York-based marketing agency.

It's fine example of raising the efficiency of PCs. But how practical it is! Again by comparing to car-pooling, much of the car users don't want somebody to commute in their car for the sake of privacy. By same logic, PC users are bothered about privacy and security. Though the person may be sitting alone in front of his PC, but his PC is connected to the whole world. If a process not initiated by it's owner is running on his PC, the PC owner/user is exposed to the outside world with no-privacy just like car.
When the car or PC user-feel the pinch of cost, and other environmental issues, the user may prefer a small car rather than car-pooling, similarly PC user will switch to a netbook instead of multi-core PC.

However there are good souls in this world who do car-pooling and ready to share their PC resources for better human cause. They are less and the market cares less for them.