Sun recently released its Grid compute utility to the public. It’s a service that allows people to access computing power through the internet for $1/CPU-hour. A comment on Slashdot asked if botnet operators could do something similar. The simple answer is that legitimate applications won’t find their way to computers taken over without the owner’s consent. But something else did cross my mind.
Recently, Sir Arthur C. Clarke sent an e-mail to all members of the SETI@home project asking for donations in light of reduced sponsorship. The e-mail also provided some very interesting statistics..

We want you to know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.

Since then the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC has been developed to give volunteers the option of sharing processing power with other projects. That is, a platform which enables different projects to share the processing power of 5.4 million volunteers is now available. Even if the BOINC project asked all volunteers to mandatorily allow 10% of their processing power to be used by commercial or amateur projects which paid for the service, they should be able to raise enough money to fund the project. I’m sure the volunteers won’t mind.
Hope there aren’t any laws which prevent raising money that way. I’m sure many companies, especially in the media space will need a lot of processing power. Riya, the photo sharing site say they have already pushed a lot of the computing to the desktop application, but with growth of broadband, the number of companies which need to do some serious number crunching will only grow.
Also, it’s very interesting to see how the basic resources like computing and storage space are now utilities on the web.