Intel, researchers to create p-to-p supercomputer

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By Dan Neel

(IDG) -- As part of Intel's ongoing campaign to popularize peer-to-peer computing, Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett on Tuesday announced the creation of The Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program.

In cooperation with members of the scientific research community and the American Cancer Society, the program will shepherd the creation of a global p-to-p network that will utilize donated computer resources to accelerate medical research, Barrett said.

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P-to-p architecture essentially links multiple computers directly to one another. Intel's program will apply that p-to-p model to calculate large scientific problems using the individual computers attached to the p-to-p network. Individuals wanting to donate their computing resources to the effort will be able to download an applet and a component of the problem, calculate that problem, and return it through the network as a contribution to solving the overall problem.

Barrett said the philanthropic nature of the program will encourage people to contribute "latent hard disk capability or computational cycle capability" to the discovery of medical cures. Donating computer time to the p-to-p network costs nothing, Barrett said.

"We can effectively get the computation ability of perhaps millions of computers," Barrett said. "Unlimited compute power for almost no cost will allow us to ask questions and hopefully answer questions people have never thought of attacking before."

Barrett hopes the p-to-p virtual supercomputer will be the biggest computing resource for scientific research ever assembled. He said achieving the equivalent of a 50 Teraflop computer with the p-to-p network was not unrealistic.

To get some idea of the compute size of a 50 Teraflop machine, the combined processing speed of all 500 of the current non-p-to-p super computers listed on the Top500.org list of the world's fastest super computers only adds up to around 1.47 Teraflops, officials said.

Ongoing concerns about security in an open p-to-p network have hindered the acceptance of p-to-p as an enterprise computing solution pending the development of better p-to-p security applications. However, Barrett said the Intel p-to-p program had been debugged "to operate behind firewalls in the corporate sector."

Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger said the security for the p-to-p network was made possible with technology from United Devices, a p-to-p computing company based in Austin, Texas.

Gelsinger said the United Devices p-to-p security application was the most advanced p-to-p security technology currently available.

Intel has been touting the virtues of p-to-p computing dating back to the company's formation of a Peer-to-Peer Working Group at last year's Intel Developer's Forum, in San Jose, Calif.

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