I'm beginning to suspect my computer does more good for the world the less I use it. During the day, I pound away at my keyboard-writing prose, sending e-mail, surfing through my usual routine of Web sites. But at night, as I sleep soundly in the other room, my computer works steadily in the darkness, trying to find a cure for smallpox. My PC is moonlighting in what technologists call a distributed-computing project. Historically, when researchers confronted a problem that required huge amounts of processing power to solve, they purchased the fastest computer they could afford and set it off in search of a solution. If they had cash to burn, they'd buy an array of supercomputers and instruct them to work in tandem on the problem. But a little more than a decade ago, computer scientists began exploring a more tantalizing scenario: A million ordinary PCs collaborating on a problem can outthink even the most expensive supercomputer.
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