The first stage of Storage@home is now launching. Storage@home is a sister project to Folding@home. The goal is to store data on volunteer machines that can then be used and processed in parallel. You can learn more about this from our previously published paper (paper #48). For this first stage the Storage@home Monitor will collect availability data and some basic statistics on the machines. We will write up the results in a paper at the end of this month, so we would love to get machines involved.
The installation process is more involved then that of Folding@home, requiring some router, firewall, and command line tinkering, but the system that will result is more capable then existing distributed computing systems. Also, this first stage is very experimental, testing certain key assumptions needed to see how well Storage@home would work. Once tested, we will work to move on to the next phases, assuming all looks good.
Please visit the Storage@home forum http://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=56 to read the FAQ and instructions to learn more. There are many important details there, so I strongly suggest people check out the FAQ to learn about the differences between Storage@home and Folding@home, as well as the nature of this first stage, experimental test.
The upshot will be that in the future, we should be able to have a much more capable system than what Folding@home can do on its own now, especially in terms of how we handle the massive amounts of data that Folding@home generates, as well as a strategy to help significantly improve server performance and stability.