PCs By Day, Supercomputers By Night

Hasn't distributed.net, seti@home, and a plethora of other such been doing this for nearly a decade?

Dual-booting? Turning a University MS Windows computer lab into a grid computer by night?

heh, cool article. One thing caught my attention:

"All day long, St. Francis Xavier University students sit at the lab's rows of PCs to surf the Internet, write papers, arrange dates or listen to podcasts. During the day, the machines run Microsoft's Windows operating system."

Why do they need winduhs to do this stuff? And their security concerns about turning their pcs over to the grid is pretty funny/clueless, considering what they do in the daytime. :) Plenty of money for windoze, but no money for researchers.

Tux2, exactly. They are making this far more difficult than it need be.

Even without converting to Linux, they could leave it as a background process running "niced", like Distributed.net, or as the screen saver a-la Seti@home.

If they were actually worried about "security", then they would boot their "cluster" from live CDs. Or run Linux in the first place. Silly Windows users.