Silverlight Supercomputer
Dan Fay pointed to an interesting article on CodeProject about building a grid computing framework that runs on Silverlight. The proposition is really interesting. Imagine someone like the folding at home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) project providing and embeddable Silverlight widget that people can place on their sites to help speed genetic research... or how about a little widget on your page that takes some of the load off of your server to help offset high traffic volumes? Just imagine how many teraflops a site like MySpace could output on a given day. Google could potentially use something like this to index the web or calculate page ranks via MapReduce and eliminate a large chunk of their server farm.
Pretty interesting possibilities here... the question is, what are the ethics of "stealing" bandwidth and CPU cycles from viewers?