This morning I thought: “What if, instead of donating your surplus computing capacity (idle processor time, storage or bandwidth) to a project like Seti@home, you could set a price for that capacity and trade it on a global marketplace? You could enter your input prices, which would mainly reflect your power/energy costs, and then the market would allocate computing tasks in an efficient manner.”

I followed it up further and I am far from the first person to have this idea, it seems.

• The GridEcon Research Project exploring “a marketplace for computing resources” (PDF)
• “Compute Power Market: Towards a Market-Orientated Grid” (PDF)
• Zimory, a (live?) German system

I am not annoyed that I didn’t get there first – in retrospect, it’s an obvious idea. I would, however, have been annoyed if I had put time into this idea before realising that others were working on it. In this way, the internet saves me years of thinking time.