Linux not only wants to dominate the Data Center and your Desktop but now it wants your unused CPU power as well. Nightlife is a grid-based computing effort that is Fedora Linux-specific.

Designed for scientific and medical research, the Nightlife project starter, Bryan Che explains the project's goals below:

Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.

Nightlife is based on the Condor project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. RedHat and UW-Madison signed a strategic partnership agreement around the Condor project in 2007.

The first distributed grid-computing project of this type I ever heard of was called SETI@Home. Seti@Home is still the most successful project of its type to date with over 5 million participants.

Look for my upcoming Crystal Ball Sunday #3 where I explore distributed computing in the workplace.