I’ve had this ongoing fascination with distributed computing projects and their commercial potential. Long ago I wrote a long piece about it which is now sadly lost. The gist of it was that it should be possible for a company to profitably exploit the vast sea of networked computers to use their computing power when their owners weren’t using it. About a year and a half ago I outfitted all of the machines in our lab at work with the Popular Power client, which was doing research on flu vaccinations, and served as proof of my earlier piece. Unfortunately the .com collapse brought down Popular Power and several other companies that were after the same goal.

But now there’s Ubero. Again promising payment for your unused cpu cycles (through paypal no less) and, at least for the time being, again focused on non-profit ‘for the public good’ research. If you’ve a win32, macosx or unix box, go get it and run it when you’re not using your computer. Help scientists save the universe…or at least cure the common cold. Or something.