I concur with what Jim says; In general I'm not a big fan of the network-of-workstation ("NOW") approach despite the fact that most desktop workstations are (a) very powerful and (b) idle a significant portion of the time. We can largely thank Microsoft and their bloatware for this gift to the sciences. The standard corporate desktop machine that folks are rolling out to support Windows 2000 and XP are amazingly powerful: typically 900mhz Pentrium III systems (or faster) with 384mb memory and a 30 gig IDE drive. When you take that class of system and multiply it by the hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of desktops that a lab or enterprise may have the NOW or seti-at-home distributed computing approach becomes attractive. My problems with the NOW approach have little to do with power and more to do with (a) unpredictable available CPU power and (b) non-trivial administrative burden and (c) having to trust & run over a public network or intranet. It may work nice in a lab, department or workgroup but can quickly get hairy in a building, campus or enterprise. This is why: o _many_ life science applications are rate limited by I/O throughput and the way they get their data is via the network. This means that the performance of your NOW system is going to be dependent on the speed and uptime of the regular internal intranet. All it takes is the start of your IT group's backup server or a couple of porn-downloadin', net-radio-listenin' people to trash your network performance. Bad network performance can do much more than slow a system down; it can cause jobs & data to disappear and other nastyness. o Workstation owners cannot be trusted [:)] They reboot their machines, start burning CDROM's, install new software, etc. etc. What this means is that over the long haul the uptime and available CPU cycles for each machine are pretty unpredictable. You are unable to handle or even plan for peak demand periods. o Non trivial administrative burden; You end up having to install and manage lots of client/server installations on machines that you may not have control or even physical access to. With a cluster you can enforce uniform configuration control and really automate things to the point where each node is pretty much disposable & interchangeble. My personal preference would be to build a cluster of dedicated servers or workstations that are all subnetted on a fast private network. Your administrative burden will be less and you will have a good handle on system status and overall available CPU horsepower. The money you spend will be made up in time, performance and deployment effort. (side notes...) One company that is doing the NOW thing in life sciences that I've heard of is TurboGenomics. They have TurboBlast available and are apparently porting that system into a more general application framework. I had an interesting interaction with a TurboGenomics employee at the Drug Discovery Conference a few weeks ago, his first words were "Blackstone? I'm not allowed to talk to you." heh. Very nice people though despite being competitors. If you are interested in the seti-at-home / distributed.net approach then "peer-2-peer" computing companies are a dime a dozen (well maybe cheaper since most have crashed and burned). Entropia seems to be sending out some interesting press releases in this area at least. -chris