Distributed Computing
In: Technology
I’ll use [Distributed.net](https://Distributed.net) as an example. They were trying to show that it was feasible to break common encryption of the time. Encryption has a key space that you need to crunch through, and it’s far more than one computer could do in any reasonable amount of time. But this key space could be divided up as needed. So people installed a client on their computers. This client would go out to [Distibuted.net](https://Distibuted.net), grab a chunk of key space, and set your computer to crunching it. When it was done it would return the results and get another chunk.
This may not sound like much, but millions of people doing this with their computers can crunch through that key space rather quickly.
This was also done by Folding@Home to do calculations on protein folding. And with that the PS3 game console was actually one of the top contributors for a while.
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