The internet can be thought of as a "metacomputer"-- a large collection of loosely coupled, heterogeneous, non-dedicated computing resources. Because of the potential power and low cost of this type of environment, users of optimization technology have the potential to solve problems of larger scale and complexity than ever before.

In the first portion of this talk, we will introduce existing software tools that allow users to harness the computational power of the internet. The second portion of the talk will deal with optimization algorithms that have been adapted to metacomputing platforms by using these software tools. As one concrete example, we will describe an implementation of a state-of-the-art algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Using this implementation, and the computational power of the internet, we are able to report the solutions of QAP instances that had been unsolved for decades.