It wouldn't do for my Mother to see anyone lollygagging about, so whenver she entered the room, a little light would go off in your head: "Hey now! Look busy!" Small wonder this sensibility carried over to my computer.

I was in the middle of looking into the state of something called "grid computing" when I suddenly felt guilty that my computer was lollygagging about, doing mostly nothing in a manner of speaking. Sure it services my occasional taps on the keyboard, displays web sites on a daily basis, and handles my basic word processing. But most of the time it just sits there on idle.

With a little effort, my computer could be solving major problems for humanity, and I was sure I could hear her voice as I gazed at my innocent computer: "Get up and get going!" Just like she would deliver it when we were teenagers, never fooled by our attempts to display industrious demeanors.

Grid computing is anything but new, and most people are familiar with it from programs like SETI@home. From the user's standpoint, you download the screensaver, and when the screensaver pops up, that's when the SETI analysis program kicks in and analyzes the data it's collected from its mighty radio antenna arrays. The point of the SETI exercise is to try to detect indicators of intelligent life somewhere out there in space.

But SETI is just the first and foremost example, and not everyone buys into its premise. But now grid projects are springing up everywhere. In just four months, the World Grid Community - WGC - has mustered 4,000 teams of people and their computers on behalf of the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle.

They've made great initial headway on a protein-folding project, and have already completed other projects on cancer, smallpox and anthrax.

And what is WGC's guiding principle? Humanitarian research.

So, it's hard to ignore. Humanity needs your computer.

To be sure the infrastructure of grid computing is filling in. People are acting as lead volunteers, corralling idle computers everywhere. The technology is getting more sophisticated, becoming resistant to the possibility of computer viruses. And the user's choice of scientific applications is swelling.

From a tech history point of view, the worm turned several years ago. Given the widespread availability of the Internet and the unprecedented computing power of pc's, no one could build a single computer which can exceed the power of a network of computers acting together.

For certain kinds of scientific problems, the ones which require a whole lot of computation, it's no longer relevant to ask "How big a computer can I build?" In a real sense, the burning question has become "How big a network of computers can I get organized? And how long will it take to solve my problem?"

There's no doubt, the Internet is changing the economics of computation, but it requires the cooperation of a whole of people who must individually choose to participate.

So, if working on the search for extraterrestrial life, modeling the protein, finding drug therapies for smallpox, making headway into the inner workings of cancer or chasing anthrax doesn't appeal to you, then just sit tight. At the World Computing Grid project alone, they expect to support about 6 new research projects each year.

So … get up and get going!

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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