The idea of new businesses seeking to tap the slumbering processing power on thousands of home PCs sounds enticing, but the models are unproven. Although the at-home pitch worked well for the SETI project, businesses are likely to keep their projects behind company firewalls. Handing off sensitive corporate data to unknown PCs over the public Internet poses serious technical and security issues. PCs vary in power, operating systems and availability. If a participant shuts down his PC during a crucial bit of computation to go on vacation for two weeks, the work it was doing must be reassigned.
Limited bandwidth can jam up traffic, forcing some slices of processing to wait in long queues.
And while data can be encrypted in transit, they have to be decrypted while a hard drive does its work. That invites prying eyes to piece operations together. Amassing a huge supply of clock cycles won't be easy, either. So the companies pushing home-PC projects resort to bribery. Porivo Technologies offers a shot at a free mountain bike.