What is theSkyNet?

Your computer is bored. It has spare computing power nearly all the time that could be used to do something cool. So why not let it? By connecting 100s and 1000s of computers together through the Internet, it’s possible to simulate a single machine capable of doing some pretty amazing stuff. That’s what theSkyNet is all about – using your spare computing power to process radio astronomy data.

Distributed computing is nothing new, but I certainly wouldn’t say it ever gets old. The capabilities of distributed computing… can be quite mind boggling… The basic concept is that multiple computers work together as one giant computational machine. Sort of like Devastator from Transformers.

SETI @ Home, Protein Folding @ Home, OnLive, and pretty much everything that Google does, are all examples of distributed, or parallel computation. TheSkyNet is just the new kid on the block, and it looks promising…

So rather than just looking for ET, theSkyNet is trying to just crunch the numbers for the universe! The best part is that just like SETI and Protein Folding @ Home, you can be a part of it, without really having to do anything other than install something, and leave your computer on. Try it out folks, the more people that join in, the better the results will be! We’re going to need to know what’s out there if we’re going to actually travel there one day…

Oh and by the way… as a word of caution… distributed computing can work for the side of evil too… This is called ‘theSkyNet’… so if you support our new robot overlords, I wouldn’t say that a giant computation network is really a bad thing. It all depends on your definition of evil. I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I just thought I’d throw it out there in case you weren’t aware of the potential consequences of networking tons of computers together.