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CPUsage provides developers with a SETI@home-style grid computing platform. CPUsage offers computer owners rewards in exchange for access to their unused CPU resources. It then licenses those resources to customers for CPU intensive applications such as scientific analysis and graphic rendering. All the data stored on users' computers is encrypted.

CPUsage offers customers a pay as you go billing model similar to cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services EC2.

IBM Watson has hit a chord. You can see it in how the press behaves at an event such as IBM Pulse, which ends today. In the press event yesterday, several in the international press asked about Watson, its uses and why it's not a search engine.

Steve Mills runs IBM's massive software group. He fielded questions and reiterated what he had said in the keynote earlier that day at the IBM Pulse event. He said the world is getting more complex and computers don't get tired. They don't complain. You can yell at them and they won't yell back - or quit for that matter.

One of the primary ideas behind IBM's Smarter Planet concept is a web of sensors all over the planet, leading to a data explosion. But what if that web of sensors was more directly under the public's control? Strategic forecast consultant Chris Arkenberg hits on an interesting idea in a recent blog post. He muses on the idea of using mobile phones for grid computing, a la SETI@home, to create massive distributed supercomputers for processing all of this data. "Consider the processing power latent across a city of 20 million mobile subscribers, such as Tokyo," he writes.

Arkenberg takes the idea further by suggesting that sensors could be built into mobile phones that could monitor air quality or act as a sort of distributed surveillance system. The possibilities are endless. "Consider what could be done with an API for addressing clusters of mobile sensors," he writes.

CERN today officially unveiled the massive computer network that will crunch the enormous amount of data coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN expects that the LHC will produce around 15 petabytes of data every year. While the LHC was in its planning stages, CERN's IT department decided that the only realistic way to handle this amount of data would be by relying on the then still novel idea of grid computing. CERN's grid consists of 100,000 processors at 140 scientific institutions in 33 countries.