by Jack Davis

Created on: June 29, 2008

Utility computing, the science of using many computers to together to perform a task no single computer could perform in a reasonable time, has become increasingly important since desktop processors stopping growing in speed exponentially. In order to complete larger tasks, more computers rather than newer computers are now required. Soon this concept will be at the core of a lot of internet transactions. Computing power has become a commodity and soon there will be a consumer economy built around it. Here's how:

The economic model for a lot of the internet is to earn money through advertisement instead of directly from the consumer. This works great for online services like search engines, social networks, news and webgames where people come back to view the advertisements many times.

It's not a good model for one-time downloadable media like music, videos, and software where one consumer generates a tenth of a penny or less each from ad-revenue. What's worse, many experienced web users are becoming "ad-blind". Either these users have software installed to block advertisements completely, or they simply ignore it. Each advertisement reduces the effect of other advertisement that consumer has seen recently. This leaves producers of content fighting for smaller and smaller shares of ad revenue.

What if your computer generated the revenue for you?

Consider how much of its CPU your computer is using as you read this. Is it running something intensive in the background? It probably isn't using more than a third of the computing capacity it's capable of unless you're running a grid computing project in the background like BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). This computing power is worth a lot. Sun Utility Computing charges $1 USD for one hour on one computer on their dual-processors with 4GB of RAM, so it should be a reasonable assumption that two-thirds of a typical desktop computer is worth at least 10 cents per hour.

A system could be built around this. Clients who need computing can submit their work in a format that can be done by many computers in parallel. Ordinary computer users download units of the work to be done, let their computers crunch it and upload the results. The work dispatching system then assigns credit to the users based on how many calculations the work took.

Users can spend those credits in exchange for digital goods and services such as software, music, videos, membership in online games and so on. Finally, the client

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