Big Grid Super Computer - the World's first wireless super computer

Welcome to the BigGrid, an exciting collaboration between techno TV presenter Jason Bradbury, computer guru Rue Turner and…. you! That's right, this project needs your help, right now.

The BigGrid is a simple experiment with grand aspirations. By downloading our tiny tailor made program you will become part of a grid-computer. At this stage the dinky program you install will simply tell us how quick your computer is and work out how much of your machine's ‘grey matter' we could use. But we won't actually use anything just yet. We are simply gathering info to project how much power our ‘collective computer' might have. You'll be able to log in and check it's growth, even team up with your buddies. There might even be a prize for the team with the highest collective horsepower.

And in the future, we might work up an application that uses the available processing power; but you'll have to download and install a whole new app for that so don't worry, we can't do anything without your express permission.

Take time to browse the site and be sure to check out our other domains www.jasonbradbury.com and www.thinlayer.co.uk .

Are you part of the Big Grid?

Have you ever thought how little all your incredibly cool hardware is really used? I'm not just talking about your PC at home or work, but your laptop, PDA, and mobile phone too. You'd be surprised how little of the potential processing power of your machines and toys are used. Humans are generally pretty wasteful of resources. We like to have everything just sitting waiting for us to place our demands on it. Well that's fair enough, but what about the time when we are not using them? Couldn't it be getting on with something useful? Even if I can't think of anything for them to do, surely someone somewhere could utilise the power. Yes indeed, that is what the BigGrid is all about. An open source, open network for combining all the resources of lazy machines everywhere into one big fat supercomputer.

There are several grid systems out there already, but BigGrid will be the first to incorporate wireless technology into the grid. At the moment, wireless technology isn't very powerful, but we all know that is changing and it won't be long before we are all laughing about how our 4Ghz mobile phone is more powerful than the 'rubbish' PC we used to have.

Grid supercomputer technology has been with us since we managed to network them together and noticed that more than 80% of computers are for the most part, idle. That is to say - they are busy doing nothing. However, sometimes people such as research labs and the like need huge amounts of processing power to handle all the data. It was clear that if we could somehow lend the idle CPU cycles to the people that needed it most, it would be a very economical use of those resources.

Nowadays, people are using wireless technologies more and more but this remains an untapped source of idle processors. TheBigGridwas founded with the intention of building the world's first and finest wireless supercomputer grid network.

It's very early stages yet and we are still developing the processor clients for various platforms.