by , 12:00 AM EST, February 13th, 2007

MacResearch.org announced on Monday the first wide-scale, publicly accessible computing grid based on Apple's Xgrid technology called OpenMacGrid. Anyone using Mac OS X Tiger or later and an Internet connection can donate CPU cycles to assist researchers with compute intensive tasks in a fashion similar to SETI@home.

OpenMacGrid will be open to any scientist who submits a proposal that is approved. Scientists can apply for access to OpenMacGrid at the MacResearch.org Website.

There is no software for the host users to install, and their system is is managed by system preferences and a specially developed Dashboard widget. System requirements and setup for users have been posted.

More information is available from David Gohara at MacResearch.org.

TMO notes that if the average daily, idle processing power for most Macs were in the vicinity of a gigaflop, then a million Apple contributors to this project would create the current holy grail supercomputer for scientists: a collective one petaflop. That is, assuming that the codes can properly exploit a distributed computing model called, by the community, "Embarassingly parallel."