In an announcement that will likely have long term implications for users of personal computers, the International Linux Foundation today reported that it will release a version of its operating system that will include a link to a distributed network.
This distributed network will allow all users of the new Linux version to share one another's central processing units (CPU). Users who are not taking full advantage of their computers' CPUs will automatically share available CPU cycles with those Linux users who are executing procedures that can take advantage of extra cycles that exceed their own computer's CPU.
Distributed networks, such as the Seti@Home project, which now requires the BOINC application, enable potentially millions of computer CPUs to share the effort of calculating complex formulae and searching large data pools. BOINC and Seti@Home are provided courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley.
The new Linux distribution, while similar to the BOINC network in effect, will not require the installation of the BOINC client software. By design, each computer on which the new version of Linux is installed will automatically seek out other similar installations and connect seamlessly into a distributed network, all without requiring the user's taking any affirmative consent or action. The net effect of will be a global distributed network of Linux computers, some of which have hundreds of thousands of CPUs already networked into a single cluster, will share the processing power of one another's CPUs.
A single user executing an application that requires trillions of CPU cycles may find the application completing in seconds, as the Linux distributed network shared the applications execution across hundreds of free CPUs. Given that Linux is used worldwide, free CPU cycles are expected to always be available, as computers are usually left running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Those computers that are expected to provide the greatest service are Web servers, which are connected to the Internet backbone through high bandwith connections. Home users connected via broadband will also provide a solid foundation to this new distributed Linux network, especially those with fiber to the home connections that have high speed upstream connections.