The promise of grid computing.

I was reading my weekly haul of industry articles when I came across this article on InformationWeek. They mention in the article how IBM “will provide researches and scientists with the ability to harness supercomputer ower, allowing them to simultaneously analyse in one day a volume of cancer biopsy specimens, or tissue microarrays, that would take 13 decades to do with standard PCs”.

Doing the math, thats nearly 5000 times their current computing power. The interesting thing about this isn’t that its 5000 times faster, but that it can be done in one day. When 130 years of raw analysis can be done in one day it means that scientists have the scope to be more speculative about how they spend that computing time – want to try a different calculation? Its only going to cost you a day – not the rest of your life.

It would be interesting to understand the kinds of calculations that are being performed and how easily it could be distributed on gridenvy.com. One of the things that I’ve always had in the back of my head with this thing is “you might help cure cancer”. Given that the grid hasn’t really grown much I doubt it, but I wonder if people would be more keen to connect if the grid was doing something for the good of humanity?