Recycling Cycles? New Technology Conservation" Program Announced

The idle bandwidth and computing cycles of hundreds of computers worldwide to good use by providing accurate Web site capacity and performance measurements from the so-called edge" of the Internet instead of the backbone.

In a time when doing more with less" has become a corporate dictum, a California-based company has announced a novel and ingenious approach to doing more with less" on quite a large scale. Called Capacity Calibration from Distributed Computing, Inc. (DCI), it puts the idle bandwidth and computing cycles of hundreds of computers worldwide to good use by providing accurate Web site capacity and performance measurements from the so-called edge" of the Internet instead of the backbone.

According to Joseph Giove, the President and CEO of DCI, The old fashioned way of measuring Web site capacity requires a lot of dedicated computers, personnel and expensive software to implement. Besides being a colossal waste of valuable resources, the measurements are incaccurate because they completely ignore the effect of the last mile between the users desktop and their ISP. Not only that, but the amount of traffic they can generate is limited by the number of dedicated computers available. Generating traffic levels of only 1,000 visitors could easily require a room full of 50 to 100 computers. And large scale Web sites must usually handle 5000 or more concurrent visitors."

DCI pays its members to allow their broadband-connected computer to take part in capacity measurement tests in the background while they continue using the computer as usual. Over 2,500 people in most of the 50 states and hundreds of cities worldwide have downloaded the CapCal Agent program and that number is growing daily. Instead of wasting dedicated resources to accomplish this, companies can now rent" the spare bandwidth and computers of CapCals agent network on demand, for far less money than before. We think CapCal is the right solution at the right time and at the right place ­ we are setting the stage for major advances in Internet performance over the coming years", says Giove.

About Distributed Computing Inc. (DCI): DCI, based in San Francisco, California, develops commercial software applications using the distributed computing model made famous by such projects as SETI@home. DCI's first commercial application is Capacity Calibration or CapCal, a hosted capacity analysis service bureau offering that uses the spare resources of computers sitting on desktops around the world to generate real traffic against any Web site for accurate, real-life capacity and performance measurements. The company also offers CapCal Inside, which measures the capacity and performance of Intranet sites and corporate portals, as well as a hosted self-service offering.

Contact: Randy Hamilton, VP Business Development, rhamilton@capcal.com, 877-428-8114, www.CapCal.com <http://www.capcal.com/>