Financial, political and technical constraints place limits on how large such systems can become. Few individual institutions or research groups can afford this level of investment. Internet Computing Rapid improvements in communications technologies are leading many to consider more decentralized approaches to the problem of computing power. There are over 400 million PCs around the world, many as powerful as an early 1990s supercomputer. And most are idle much of the time.
Every large institution has hundreds or thousands of such systems.
Internet computing seeks to exploit otherwise idle workstations and PCs to create powerful distributed computing systems with global reach and supercomputer capabilities. The opportunity represented by idle computers has been recognized for some time. Exploiting the multitasking possible on the popular Unix operating system and the connectivity provided by the Internet, Livny's Condor system is now used extensively within academia to harness idle processors in workgroups or departments. It is used regularly for routine data analysis as well as for solving open problems in mathematics. In 1997, Scott Kurowski established the Entropia network to apply idle computers worldwide to problems of scientific interest.