Distributed computers power new search engine

A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week.

The project's home page says that in the last 24 hours over 36 million web pages have been catalogued by Grub software installed by users on about 1000 personal computers around the globe.

Like SETI@home and other distributed computing projects, Grub runs in the background on a computer's spare capacity. It automatically trawls the web and collects details on thousands of pages per hour and returns this information to a central database. The Grub screen saver that displays the websites the program is scouring.

New Scientist Report

These guys better watch out: First of all, the technology they are using looks suspiciously like a distributed P2P system... also, one of the 4 university students being sued by the RIAA was only running a SEARCH ENGINE, and happened to be unlucky enough to be the one that locked onto the LAN hosting the other 3 file traders.....

But then, the RIAAs moto is "When in doubt, sue somebody!"

No thanks, Im done with distributed computing... one kept accessing my computer constantly trying to log in. Thanks but no thanks.

P2P sharing and distributed PC grids are bad news in my opinion. Consider the following report related to the Kazaa software bundle:

Brilliant Digital makes a viewer, b3d Projector, for displaying digital advertising. In this case, the Brilliant Digital software was being bundled with the popular Kazaa file trading program. According to the article, Brilliant Digital was planning to use the unused disk space and CPU cycles on machines that had downloaded Kazaa. In fact, they were planning to market those cycles and disk space to other companies.

It's pretty outrageous that a third party would be sold access to use my CPU and store / transfer their data on / from my hard disk.

Food for Thought,
Deep

dragonrider were the 3 kids that were busted big time file traders or people who downloaded a couple songs a week?

So do we have a link to the index? I'd love to compare it against google.

Does anyone know if Deep Blue used distributed computing illicitly?

www.grub.org...

Originally posted by Imnotzarathustra
Does anyone know if Deep Blue used distributed computing illicitly?

Nah. It didn't. It would have been too much of a mess to do that. The supercomputers can blow the socks off any distributed network.

(my spouse used to write code to benchmark big iron like Big Blue for defense contractor applications. That's how I know.)

[Edited on 22-4-2003 by Byrd]