The New York Times has an article on grid computing, or the coordination of many geographically dispersed machines to accomplish large computational tasks. EFF has been running the Cooperative Computing Awards, a contest where winners have to find extremely large prime numbers, for several years now. The Times article points out that the path to better living on the grid is simple and stupid:

The wisdom of their work, according to computer scientists, lies in its farsighted simplicity, designing a set of minimalist standards that others can build upon. It is the same design philosophy, they note, found in the original Internet and the Web.

"If you look at the history of computer science, the people who have had the biggest impact are the ones who envisioned big systems and then came up with simple but smart mechanisms for building those systems," said Dr. Ken Kennedy, a computer science professor at Rice University. "That's what Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman have done."

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