Does anybody know if there exists a "free to use" grid/distributed computing network? As in, a cluster of volunteers in the grid, such as those that contribute to something like seti@home, but that is free to use by any of the people that contribute to it? If not, would there be any way to say... create a networked grid of computers, with thousands of nodes all accross the internet, and have the users run a server on their computer that would use spare processor cycles, memory, storage space, etc, and have them all clustered togather, in a useful fassion, and also in a way that any one of those contributors could log onto the network in a unix/linux/whatever environment and run programs of processor/memory/storage intensive nature, and have the users of the network's processors scheduled against however much time they put into the project?

I was just wondering if this has ever been done before, or if it's even feasable, or would be clobbered by bandwidth bottlenecks and leeches and such to the point where the end user wouldn't get any gain out of being on the network. Also, if it has been done, could somebody point me in the dirrection as to where I could find a project of this nature?

Thanks,
Marshall

It's like driving with your feet. It's possible but probably dumb.

Have a think about why a lot of p2p networks are such viral minefields and why seti@home keeps having people publishing fraudulent clients etc. and it will start to dawn on you that not only are these types of projects complicated but they are plagued with problems associated with a lot of people with a lot of different levels of computing expertise being involved.

Distributed computing is a pretty complicated area that large groups of people invest a lot of money in. I've looked around to see if there is anything like an open sourced DC project and there isn't. I'm pretty sure I understand why.

That one is free and open source:
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

K, I was wrong. :-S

It happens. Good luck with that tho, I don't imagine it's easy. That part of my reply still stands.

hi,
there are at least http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and http://www.xtremweb.net

hope this helps,
Oleg