Comment Re:The Idle Cycles Fallacy (Score 1) 70
Not necessarily. A lot of these smaller research teams would have to pay big bucks to get on a decent grid (within a reasonable research timeframe). BOINC affords them that with very little cost.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VolunteerComputing
Why is volunteer computing important?
It's important for several reasons:
- Because of the huge number (> 1 billion) of PCs in the world, volunteer computing can supply more computing power to science than does any other type of computing. This computing power enables scientific research that could not be done otherwise. This advantage will increase over time, because the laws of economics dictate that consumer products such as PCs and game consoles will advance faster than more specialized products, and that there will be more of them.
- Volunteer computing power can't be bought; it must be earned. A research project that has limited funding but large public appeal can get huge computing power. In contrast, traditional supercomputers are extremely expensive, and are available only for applications that can afford them (for example, nuclear weapon design and espionage).
- Volunteer computing encourages public interest in science, and provides the public with voice in determining the directions of scientific research.
