Soon pharmaceutical companies or any other business that has a need for supercomputer power from time to time could be renting that power or creating it for themselves with their own idle desktop machines, said Mr Findlay.

BBC: Why the future will be easier to use

Started in late 1998, the space-alien hunt has recruited the owners of 2.5 million PCs, tapping their machines' idle processing time to search small chunks of radio telescope data for patterns that might signal intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.

FORBES: Sharing Power

When a designer is ready to test part of a new chip layout, his workstation uses NetBatch to find all the other machines on the network that are idle, whether they are in Ireland or China or the U.S., and feed the job to them.

FORBES: Sharing Power