According to the statistics of CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center),
the Chinese online population occupies about 12% of the world online population and
it's rapidly increasing! (The Chinese statistic includes Mainland China, Hong Kong S.A.R,
Macao S.A.R and Taiwan)
You may ask why and how Internet use developed so quickly in China? There are many factors.
First, it is relatively inexpensive. For example,
an ADSL 512K line with 24 hours online in Shanghai costs 120 RMB (about 15 USD ) per month. Second,
the education system. The government has set up a lot of computer classrooms in not only universities,
but also junior and senior high schools (this makes many teenagers interested in informatics including me,
I started to learn computer when Windows 3.1 was released).
For more information about Internet in China,
please visit Survey Report on Internet Development in China hosted on CNNIC.
Compared with the great progress of Internet use in China,
Distributed Computing is still developing very slowly.
In my view, the number of participants for Distributed
Computing can demonstrate the technology/science popularization of a country.
No doubt, North American and Western European countries perform well in Distributed
Computing. In Scandinavian countries, nearly half of the computers participated.
It's an incredible percentage!. But countries like China and India,
though they have done quite well in adopting modern technology,
and seem to be quite successful in Internet popularization (according to the increases in online population),
they are, however, very poor in Distributed Computing. Let's look at some good examples:
SETI@home is the biggest distributed computing project in the world and
it's the most well-known project in China. It uses Internet-connected
computers in conducting the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Volunteers run a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
Though China has stepped up from 29th place to 24th place in the year 2003,
it is only 10% of the numbers of Japanese participants (Japan being a
developed country which has a smaller online population than China).
Folding@homeWhat does Folding@Home do?
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding,
misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. It uses novel computational methods
and large scale distributed computing to simulate timescales thousands to millions
of times longer than previously possible. This has allowed researchers to simulate
protein folding for the first time, and to focus more of their attention on folding related diseases.
ClimatePrediction The climateprediction.net experiment has been developed to
allow a state-of-the-art climate prediction model to be run on home, school,
or work computers. By getting data from thousands of climate models,
it will generate the world's largest climate prediction experiment.
Unfortunately, There are still very few participants in China.
Mainland China has vast numbers of good computers, but most of them
are only running programs like MS-Word or Power Point, what a waste
of potential distributed computing power!
On the other hand, we can see the gap between developed countries
and developing countries. It's called the Digital Divide (To learn more about the
digital divide please click here).
Another phenomenon is that these distributed computing projects are all hosted by
North American or Western Europe countries. In another way, this can also extend the
distal divide of the world. Dr. Graham Richards, Chairman of Chemistry at Oxford
University that grid computing is unmatched in its ability to accelerate today's
grand-scale research. Scientists now have at their disposal, resource that can open
up new areas of discovery and analysis in time frame that was previously impossible.
This is true. But we must also mention that this will aggravate the disparity between
developed and developing countries' scientific research.
In China, authorities have begun to realize the importance of distributed computing,
and some university professors and scientists are now studying distributed computing
(also called "grid computing").
link:
http://www.aowe.net/Internet2/200705150106435_3.html
