While a university biologist grades papers, her computer sits unused. On the desk of an engineering professor, a neglected workstation hums quietly through the night.
Idle computers mean wasted computing power.
And Miron Livny, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of computer sciences, hates waste. Rather than see computers lie fallow, a group of computer scientists now led by Livny has been developing Condor, a software system that puts inactive computers back to work. Like a vulture circling the desert, Condor scavenges for processing power that would otherwise be lost. The idea behind Condor is simple. It matches any computational jobs that computer users have with spare power in other owners' computers.