ISP Juno wants to use computing power of its "free" subscribers

Juno is one of the Us largest Internet access providers, with 14.2 million total registered subscribers and 4.0 million active subscribers in December 2000.

The company says: "While the personal computers owned by different Juno subscribers have different performance characteristics, preliminary studies recently completed by the company suggest that if the computers of all of Juno's active free subscriber base were simultaneously working on a single computational problem, they would together represent the world's fastest supercomputer (measured in terms of aggregate instructions per second), and might approach or break the "petahertz barrier" (with a hypothetical effective processor speed on the order of a billion megahertz). Although the achievable effective computing power (and the level of any associated revenues) are likely to be significantly lower in practice for a variety of reasons, Juno's management believes that the unused computing power of its free subscriber base represents a potentially valuable asset from the viewpoint of both potential revenue generation and potential contribution to society."

And that is not all. The company "expects to focus particular attention on prospective clients involved in bioinformatics research who are beginning to confront such computationally demanding applications as the determination of the structure of proteins encoded by gene sequences discovered through recently completed efforts to sequence the human genome, and searching through millions of "virtual molecules" to find promising candidates for new pharmaceutical products. Juno's management believes that many such problems can be effectively divided into a large number of smaller computational tasks in such a way as to capture substantial potential gains in both speed and cost-effectiveness by comparison with traditional supercomputing approaches. Additionally, Juno's service is designed to make it possible for customers to access very large amounts of processing power over relatively short periods of time without having to bear the high overhead costs associated with the in-house acquisition or rental of conventional supercomputers or "computer farms.""

The Juno Virtual Supercomputer Project will make use of patented technology Juno currently employs in connection with its display of advertising to download computational tasks to subscribers' computers for processing offline during time when such subscribers are not using their computers. The results of such offline computations will then be uploaded to Juno's central computers during a subsequent connection, in much the same way that Juno currently collects responses to the advertisements it shows offline.

Applications will run as "screen savers" on the computers of participating subscribers when their machines would otherwise be idle, performing calculations when the computer is on but not in use. Neither the download nor the operation of these applications are expected to have any significant impact on the user experience or on the connection speeds subscribers experience while using Juno.

Subscribers to Juno's free basic service may ultimately be required to make their unused computing power available to the project as a condition for using that service. While the company's billable subscribers may be offered the opportunity to participate on a strictly optional basis in order to advance biomedical research and/or other forms of scientific and technical progress, the company does not currently expect to require the participation of such subscribers.

Although it certainly is not the first company trying this, Juno is the first imposing it on its free subscribers. This has caught a lot of attention, because it raises questions concerning privacy.