Google likely will expand the programme to include other scientific endeavors, and possibly even computational problems, to benefit its search business, Wojcicki said. But Google Compute isn't likely to become a source of revenue. "You never want to say never, but the goal now is to contribute something to science. We have enough fish to fry in our current businesses," Wojcicki said. Google, having secured its position as a top search engine, has been pulling out all the stops to increase its revenue -- likely in anticipation of an initial public offering, some believe. The company's grander aspirations have been visible in features such as a news feed, targeted advertisements, commercial search services and catalogues. Distributed computing is just one part of the overhaul of the supercomputing world. For one, existing supercomputers are being linked into "grids" of shared computing and storage resources such as the Energy Department's Science Grid, unveiled Friday. For another, groups of inexpensive Linux computers can be linked with high-speed networks to form a cheap "Beowulf" computer. Yet distributed computing has given supercomputing efforts popular appeal. The best-known distributed computing project has been SETI@home, which scans radio telescope signals for extraterrestrial communication signals. Distributed computing began with more abstruse projects, however, such as hunts for Mersenne prime numbers, optimal Golomb rulers and Fermat numbers. Though SETI@home hasn't uncovered any alien chitchat, distributed computing has had its successes. Most recently, one effort with 210,000 participating computers uncovered a 4,053,946-digit prime number, the largest found so far. Getting the word out
Google's toolbar addresses one of the key obstacles in distributed computing: propagating the software to all the computers involved in the effort. And if people are eager to participate in the distributed computing program, they might be more inclined to install the toolbar, which beefs up Web browsers with links to Google's search engine. The Google Compute software works on Windows 98, Me, 2000 and XP, Google said. In the more exuberant climate of Internet business of the late 1990s, several start-ups seized the idea that money could be made by selling processing power to pharmaceutical companies and others. The prospect faded, though; one site, Popular Power, shut down, and e-mail provider Juno Online Services ran into controversy when it tried out the idea. Distributed computing as a business prospect today generally is focused on using a corporation's own computers, a much more controlled and predictable environment than the entire Internet. Companies involved in this arena included United Devices, Turbolinux, Sun Microsystems, Parabon Computation, Platform Computing and Avaki, formerly Applied MetaComputing. Some companies still sponsor distributed computing projects that extend to the entire Internet, however. United Devices' network helped to screen molecules that could be related to anthrax. And Parabon is involved with the Compute Against Cancer effort to boost cancer research.
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