IDGF showcasing its infrastructure at ICRI 2014 IDGF showcasing its infrastructure at ICRI 2014

A million computers glued into one e-Infrastructure for scientists

A crowd computing "supercomputer"

IDGF is showcasing its infrastructure at ICRI 2014, April 2-4, 2014, in Athens, Greece.

Most computers in the world are idle most of the time. With crowd computing we offer citizens at home the possibility to donate unused computing time to science. Using so-called volunteer Desktop Grid techniques we glue all this computer power together and make it available to European researchers.

The International Desktop Grid Federation is a member organisation that brings together people from companies, universities and institutes that are interested in using crowd   computing power and that want to exchange experiences with others.

Desktop Grids &  Desktop Cloud  technology allow to employ otherwise idle computing time of Desktop computers for large computational programmes.  Desktop Grids can also  be used inside an organisation, or they can collect computing time from volunteers all over the country, or even all over the world.

The International Desktop Grid Federation  has almost 50 organisations from all over the world as members. Many of these organisations are European-based.
They all operate Desktop Grids, mainly for scientific users. The core partners operate an interconnected e-infrastructure that connects close to a million computers all over Europe.

We are connected to for instance the EGI e-Infrastructure. This allows scientific communities to include crowd computing as a resource in their scientific production work flows.

In the booth we intend to show the following:

  1. Life demonstration of scientific applications running on the infrastructure
  2. A small local Desktop Grid (based on This will contain 8  computers and will be fully operational as a miniature version of the complete infrastructure. This will be used to explain the technical basics, and interact with the booth visitors so we can life demonstrate how the million-computer infrastructure actually operates.
  3. We also aim to have an explanatory video running when there is no life demo. This video is something similar like
  4. We intend to  set up live links with a scientific user and show how donated computing power is used for scientific research applications
  5. And we explain how you can help science by start donating unused computing time today.