Entropia's global distributed computing grid of PCs will provide the power to enable this computationally intensive project for researchers at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester. The launch of the SaferMarkets project occurs as millions of people worldwide feel the impact of the significant downturn in world stock markets. SaferMarkets offers people around the globe the unique opportunity to accelerate research to make markets safer by applying their PCs' unused processing time to the project. The more people that join the distributed computing grid, the more computing power that will be available for the research, with results obtained that much faster. Entropia's grid can support literally millions of PCs, providing as much as tens of teraflops of computing power, more than the combined processing power of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
People can join the effort simply by downloading free software .
The software runs completely unobtrusively, applying unused processing power to the research even while the PC is being used. The SaferMarkets project will be deployed in three phases. In Phase I, simulated historical data will be created and analyzed to test and refine mathematical formulas for predicting the probability, degree and duration of future market volatility. The final phase will explore applicability of these formulas to individual equities. The model that will be used is based on the concept of stochastic volatility, which is capable of explaining the frequencies of ordinary and extreme market movements.