Michael R. Shirts and Vijay Pande, Science 2000.
Summary: Is distributed computing a fundamental advance or simply fashionable computing? In this brief letter, we show how distributed computing can be used to tackle problems which make even supercomputers quake. Indeed, we show how distributed computing has the ability to create a supercomputer thousands of times more powerful than any existing machine, due the large number of processors on the internet (hundreds of millions) and the relatively small number of computer processors in supercomputers (thousands).