Entropia Distributed Computing

History of the company


Entropia was founded in early 1997 by Scott Kurowski, who created the first version of the Entropia network, called PrimeNet. He recruited Dr. Andrew Chien, a leading innovator in scalable distributed computing. As Entropia's CTO in October 1999.

Significant Releases

  1. FightAIDSatHome
    Entropia released the commercial version of the Entropia network in September 2000 and launched www.fightaidsathome.org, allowing anyone to contribute their PCs' unused processing power to help screen candidate drug compounds in the fight against AIDS with the Olson laboratory in San Diego.
  2. SaferMarket
    In March 2001, Entropia launched (www.safermarkets.org) in conjunction with researchers at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester to predict stock market volatility so that its effects can be mitigated.

Partners

  1. National Computational Science Alliance ("Alliance")
  2. National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)

Differences from OCEAN

  1. No auctioning system
  2. No monetary profit for the users
  3. Cost for usage determined by Entropia
  4. A central server running Entropia software
  5. The application may be in any programming language to be run on Entropia
  6. Entropia says their scalability is virtually limitless
  7. Triple DES encryption in Entropia

Literature
   The associated literature and Entropia technology are not published.

Cost
   The members get no profit from the Entropia network though the company seems to be charging its clients as cited by its "cost-effective method".

Usage

  1. System Requirements for Entropia Cause Computing
    Windows 2000, NT 4.0, Me, or Windows 98
    Internet Explorer version 5 or higher installed
    32MB minimum, 96MB for most projects
  2. Entropia Software Usage Policies
    From time to time Entropia software will run commercial applications for customers on the user's computers, then resume work on the non-profit projects of their choice.