I’m back! The week or two off was good for me. Hopefully, it’ll help me focus and write more effectively. Please be patient with me; it’s likely you’ll see these mysterious, unexplained absences from time to time. I think in spurts.

Grid computing is the buzzword quickly circulating throughout the technology industry and the media. Basically, grid computing is the process of setting up a lot of small computers in a way that they can calculate a big problem by dividing it in smaller parts. This way, you can build a powerful supercomputer with inexpensive components. You can even use existing company computers or enlist the public for help, lowering the cost even more.

The possibilities are profound. The first public grid, SETI@home, was designed to search for radio signals that might be indicative for extraterrestrial life. I had participated in this a few weeks, until I stumbled on this convincing article from ChristianAnswers.net. Even so, the technology itself was fascinating. Because you could potentially get thousands of computers to donate their unused clock cycles, the potential for total processing power is astonishing. It could easily surpass my local supercomputer, the Maui High Performance Computing Center.

Private grids are being quickly built too. The most notable system in recent memory consists of 70 Playstation 2 game consoles at NCSA. (NCSA, as you may recall, wrote the next-generation Web browser, Mosaic, over ten years ago, which all current browsers are based on.)

Before you begin thinking that the only thing grids are good for is stodgy calculations that nobody with a normal I.Q. understands, think again. Kontiki has broken the paradigm. This fairly unknown company has legitimized peer-to-peer file sharing networks. By using their Delivery Grid software, you can download software and media from participating sites at the fastest possible speeds, because your computer gets portions of the file from many different computers. I tried this, and sure enough, with help from nine different computers, I downloaded a 35 megabyte file, in minutes, at around 950 kilobytes per second, which is four times faster than typical speeds on my cable modem. Plus, their privacy policy is fairly reasonable.

What will the future hold for grid computing? Well, like my theories regarding web services (which is a story for another day), I think that as people begin to embrace this technology and the idea that they can share their computer’s abilities with others, technology will improve dramatically. Imagine a voice recognition system that breaks up a single input and processes it on hundreds of computers simultaneously. That raw processing power may make the conversational computers in Star Trek a reality, and sooner than anyone expected.