I used to be a part of Free Rainbow Tables, when I used them as a penetration tester. That was back in the day where it was "cool" and a little frightening to show an entire company's worth of password hashes being cracked in minutes.

These days, you get the the password hashes, and all but the most defensive die hards will agree that their system is vulnerable, and ask you to stop there. (After all, best practice would say that if a consulting firm has seen all your passwords, you have to change every password they've seen).

It makes me wonder who really is using these rainbow tables? We only crack hashes upon special request now - usually when a company wants to do a password audit, or password recovery. I suspect the biggest users of these Rainbow Tables may actually be illegal hackers.

Not discouraging you from participating, but maybe just food for thought.

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The only problem I see with that is it assumes that the Scientists won't find MORE to do with the data that can be provided, and I think that is mistaken. Most people have a field of interest, the more info I can give you in that field, the more things you want to know! I think the same thing will happen as we users start to provide, and the projects serve up, more and more and better and more detailed data for us users to crunch. If you are into Astronomy we can already see back 13.7 BILLION years towards the 'big bang' that happened about 14 BILLION years ago, what if we could provide another 200k years worth of data, would the Scientists turn that down? NO they would not, they would ask how much more can you give me?!! They would ask can you see 15 BILLION years back? If you are into shooting guns, many years ago there was no such thing as using high speed cameras to capture the shock wave coming off the front of a bullet to see how to make it go even faster and be more accurate too. They now do that and can regularly hit a target at WELL OVER a mile!! If our crunching could give them another 1/2 mile would they so 'no thanks', of course not, they would say' can you give me even more'?! ALL cars being made today go thru 'fluid dynamics' programs to make them as fuel efficient as possible prior to actual production being started, this will increase dramatically as they look for the last 1/10 of a mpg, or mph!

I also see our crunching coming to the point of more and more computers, probably specialized software, analyzing our data and only after that a human being involved. This is actually being done now, but not to the extent it could be! Seti did it years ago, I don't know if they still do or not.

Ken, running full scale, real life atom molecular dynamics even on high end cards, per day at sites such as gpugrid still results in nanoseconds per day, the admin guesses my 680 will be able to perform 150 ns/day. Remember, you need an ecxaflop to run real time physics at the smallest level and gpus just entered the teraflop level.

We have a long way to go, and there will always be someone with experiments they wish to run, but cannot afford to do so.

I absolutely agree with you (and others) that we are currently limited by the expense of computing power, and the more available it is, the more projects people will think of to process.

However, my point is at the end of the day, computers can only calculate - humans are required to:

1. Think up of the project
2. Code up the program to do the simulation
3. Acquire samples/test data/whatever to feed the processor
4. Interpret the results.

These four steps may become the expensive ones in the futre.

Think of it this way - As 5pot pointed out, GPUs just entered the Teraflop range. The first teraflop computer was ASCI Red in 1996, cost $55M and 850kw to run. A GPU is now under $1000 and takes less than 300W to run.

If processing power went from supercomputer to deskop at the same rate, in another 16 years, will we all have 10 Petaflop GPUs plugged into our desktop? In which case, you could run "real time physics at the smallest level" using 100 desktop PCs? (10 Petaflops x 100 = 1 exaflop) At that price, would a large company doing research use distributed computing, or just buy their own?

We'll keep thinking of more and more projects we want to run on these incredibe machines, now that the computing power is so available and so cheap - but those four processes I listed above will not change - and it seems computing power is advancing faster than human power is!