Distributed networks?

["Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>]

Something that might work to our advantage...

The folks behind SETI@Home have produced a package
called BOINC [1] that allows one to allocate fractions
of your compute resources.

As I don't don't think much of the SETI@Home project I've
never used my CPU resources for that.  Instead I prefer to
dedicate them to Folding@Home [2].  If it ever gets off the
ground I intended to use the BOINC platform for Nano@Home [3].

The nice thing about BOINC is that it lets you turn up/down
the fraction of your CPU(s) dedicated to various projects.
So one could imagine lots of different people joining the
TASS project (offering up CPU resources instead of
attempting to manage the telescope & camera nightmares [at
least from where I sit...]).   Offloading the data processing
might allow you to be a little more relaxed about when a
machine goes down the tubes.

When you run into a problem of machines going down you
could just send a note to the TASS community to ask them
to up their BOINC priorities for TASS.  If enough people
joined one could perhaps even eliminate home data processing
(lowering your electricity and A/C requirements presumably...).
You might have to shift attention a bit to redundancy in
internet communications (Cable + Satellite?) and a router
that can deal with that (a Linux gateway machine probably
shouldn't have problems).

Robert

1. http://boinc.berkeley.edu
2. http://folding.stanford.edu
Note that I don't think F@H uses BOINC yet but I'm hoping
they move in that direction...
3. http://www.nanoathome.org/