French scientists have harnessed the power of 10 million computing hours by hooking up 75,000 PCs across the Internet. Now they hope to include other operating systems, the Mac among them, in their work, which could help find a cure for muscular dystrophy, according to a ZDNet France article.
The story reports that the Decryptathon, the first French initiative to harness shared computing power for scientific research, has been a “roaring” success, and that a follow-up even is being planned for 2003. What’s the Decryptathon? It connected computer systems across the Internet with the goal of enabling complex scientific calculations. Over 180,000 PC owners signed up to take part, and 75,000 of these were eventually used, according to ZDNet France. The organizers of the project were IBM and the French muscular dystrophy association, AFM.
“The take-up went far beyond what we hoped for,” Bruno Desbuleux, head of operations for AFM, told ZDNet France.
He added that some computers weren’t used because they were business systems performing administrative roles and were passed over “for reasons of Internet security.” And though the client software only ran on Windows machines this time around, “we want to extend the next operation to other operating systems, notably in partnership with Apple,” Desbuleux said.