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If New York City-based DataSynapse has its way, legions of home computers with always-on, but not always-in-use, broadband connections will lend their CPU brains to some serious financial number crunching-and their owners will get cyber cash in return.
The plan is one of several ventures popping up on the Internet frontier, proposing to harness distributed home computing power to feed corporate data needs.
Less than a year old, DataSynapse so far has used corporate intranets to dry-run its distributed computing system. But in mid-November it launched the network for residential customers, according to CEO Peter Lee. Lee, formerly an investment banker with J.P. Morgan &Co., founded the company in March with childhood chum Jamie Bernardin.
"It's important at first to really establish the appropriate benchmark-and that's on an intranet," Lee says.
Here's how it works: broadband Internet users go to www.datasynapse.com and join the network. They download a software engine that monitors their computer and notifies the DataSynapse network when the connection is idle. At that point, the central system can send the computer a task to busy the processor.
And who would need this computer brainpower? Large financial institutions needing real-time portfolio pricing models during daytime trading hours. Some of these weighty models can take up to 50 hours of processing time on a single computer, but by harnessing multiple computers, it can be reduced to just minutes during crucial Wall Street market hours.
The DataSynapse controller system breaks up that complex model into individual tasks and farms them out to the available computers. A lot depends on how many computers are available and how big their processors are, but tests so far indicate the average task time is between 30 seconds and 3 minutes, according to Lee.
The software engine also detects if users hop on the computer mid-task. At that point, the processor is switched back for the user and the task is reassigned to another available computer.
The first 10,000 customers will be paid $5 in Flooz online currency for joining the network and credited with $1 for every referral they make. Once the business is established, customers will be paid based on their PC's processing power, available idle PC power and other variables. While that will vary, Lee says it will probably be in the $5 per month range.
Users can use Flooz online currency at dozens of Web stores or donate it to a charity via Charitableway.com, a site that accepts the Internet money. DataSynapse also is offering weekly prize giveaways of Palm Pilots and even a Porsche Boxster.
Because the muscle is in the processing and not in the number-rich files that result, the system isn't a bandwidth hog, Lee points out. "One of the advantages of broadband is you can really afford to manage your network in a finely grained task implementation," he says. "We don't need to download a huge chunk of data on the PC."
"By its very nature, distributed computing is light on data, with the power in the processing," he adds.
Because the idea of an outside computer reaching inside your computer brain might raise red flags with some users, DataSynapse has partnered with ZoneLab to provide network members extra security-including beefed up digital encryption and digital signature technology. "Because we share the processors and not files, there's no possibility of intervention by hackers or corrupted files," Lee says. "We are only dialing into idle CPUs."
For now, DataSynapse will focus on financial services companies. Later, the company will start offering its distributed computing services to other industry sectors in need of collective processor firepower. DataSynapse is also partnering with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to create a beefed up search engine for the Web.
It is a project of particular interest for Lee, who says much of the problem with existing search engines is they don't have the processing power to scan the entire Web. Instead, engines spit up links that are more popular than relevant, or links that are woefully out of date. Using the hive power of multiple computer processors, his souped-up search engine would give DataSynapse customers better results for Web searches.
The company is part of a wave of new startups all looking to keep multiple computer brains busy. Houston-based computer analysis firm Currid and Co. estimates the distributed computing market will reach $9.5 billion in services by 2006, with another $7 billion spent on hardware and $13 billion on software.
While the technology to share processing power has been hammered out, what remains is finding markets willing to trust it, according Currid's president, Cheryl Currid. "These people have proven the stuff works," she says. "Now can we get anybody in business to trust them? That's where we are now."
Currid also predicts that as with any new market segment, the next step is a shakeout period to "see who's going to make it and who doesn't." While it may be too early to tell if DataSynapse makes the cut, Currid says she is encouraged by the company's initial focus on the financial services sector.
"They aren't just trying to go after everything or trying to put a square peg in a round hole," she says.
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