Interviews from the ALM Forum: Like SETI@home, but For Your Builds –

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Check out John’s interview with Dave West at the ALM Forum as well

Remember SETI@home — the screensaver that uses your idle CPU cycles to find an extraterrestrial needle in a radio-noise haystack?

Well, now you can volunteer your CPU time for loads of other scientific projects. One of the coolest is folding@home — coolest, I think, because Turing machines are great at double-helixes but not so great when degrees of freedom are determined by the interaction of huge, complicated molecules plus environmental chemistry — like, say, folding proteins.

So that’s cool science stuff, saving lives, finding aliens, whatever. But everyday development needs lots of computing power too. What if you could use the same distributed system — leveraging whatever idle CPU time is available on your local network — for builds?

Okay, of course that was a rhetorical question. Of course you can. Easily, it turns out. But how?

At the last ALM Forum I spoke with Dori Exterman, CTO of Incredibuild, a tool that turns your local network into a distributed supercomputer for pretty much any compute-heavy dev tasks. We talked about how such a tool can help you — but also about how it works, and the answers are pretty neat.

This was one of the most exciting interviews I’ve conducted in a while. Dori is a really smart guy with a really powerful product. Check it out and let us know what you think.

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