Distributed Computing Technologies and Their Application to Drug Discovery

Distributed Computing, the exploitation of idle cycles on pervasive desktop PC systems, offers the opportunity to increase the available computing power by orders of magnitude (10× to 1000×). Such large-scale resource sharing is a key part of the emerging “Grid” computing technologies being developed and pursued by a broad array of researchers, software vendors, and hardware vendors. However, for desktop PC distributed computing to be widely accepted within the enterprise, the systems must achieve high levels of robustness, security, scalability, unobtrusiveness, and manageability. In addition, as with any novel platform technology, the systems must also capture a critical mass of applications that make the platform valuable.