There is NOT enough raw computing power, and there is certainly NOT enough that is available to those who could make use of it.
I am a scientist who is lucky enough to have unfettered access to one of the top 100 supercomputers on the planet (http://www.top500.org/), and I'm STILL limited computationally. Most researchers don't have access to a thousandth of this resource. I know that the modeling & simulation field is also computationally limited. Neither field is bumping up against NP problems, just very large ones. Luckily, they are often trivial to parallelize. If you like the fruits of science, there are a small army of researchers (hobbyist and professional) whom you could help with their significant problems.
As I see it, the problem is in the gatekeeper design of the volunteer systems (like BOINC). For many problems, it wouldn't be worth it to apply to BOINC, and try to motivate enough volunteers for a one-off run that would only take a few days on their system. Also, an entire infrastructure would need to be ported to run under BOINC.
There are solutions to this problem. A cloud (I apologize for using the buzzword), where a visualized environment would be downloaded by volunteers once, and join into a cluster where vetted researhers can run arbitrary code. Then researchers who have problems that could be run in hours to days on a system like BOINC, but not in years on their own systems could just log into the head node and launch their jobs. Several groups have most of the infrastructure built (CloVR / Science Clouds / Nimbus and Magellan / Eucalyptus), but the volunteer aspect is lacking.
To get back to the original post, would someone like to port Nimbus to run in the browser, and then load it on the non-mobile wikipedia?
cpubox
