- List of distributed computing projects
A list of
distributed computing projects.Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform is currently the most popular volunteer-based distributed computing platform.
Active Projects
* Biology
**Cells@Home - studies how diseases spread through a body. [ [http://cels-at-home-dev.dyndns.org/cels/ "Cels@Home" website] ]
** Malaria Control — forstochastic modelling of the clinicalepidemiology and natural history ofmalaria .
**POEM@Home — models protein folding usingAnfinsen's dogma . [ [http://boinc.fzk.de/poem/ "POEM@Home website] ]
**Rosetta@home — tests the assembly of specific proteins, using appropriate fragments of better-known proteins.
**SIMAP — compiles a database of protein similarities using theFASTA algorithm, andprotein domains usingInterPro .
**TANPAKU — to predict protein structures usingBrownian dynamics .* Earth Sciences
**Climateprediction.net — tries to produce a forecast of theclimate in the 21st century.* Physics and Astronomy
**BRaTS@Home — to studygravitational lensing . [ [http://maxwell.dhcp.umsl.edu/brats/ "BRaTS@Home" website] ]
**Einstein@Home — uses data fromLIGO andGEO 600 to detectgravitational wave s.
**LHC@home — simulates particles travelling in theLarge Hadron Collider .
**QMC@Home — usesQuantum Monte Carlo to predict the structure and reactivity ofmolecule s.
**SETI@home — Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence* Mathematics
**ABC@Home — attempt to solve theABC conjecture problem.
**SZTAKI Desktop Grid — searches for generalized binary number systems.
** TSP - studies thetraveling salesman problem . [ [http://bob.myisland.as/tsp/ "TSP" website] ]Upcoming Projects
These projects are considered to be in the Alpha or Beta development stages.
* Mathematics
**Distributed Exact Cover Solver - solvesexact cover problems using a version of theDancing Links algorithm. [ [http://evil.podzone.org/decs/ "Distributed Exact Cover Solver" website] ] (Alpha)
**PrimeGrid — searches formegaprime s. (Beta)
**Ramsey@Home - searches for new lower bounds of Ramsey numbers [ [http://ramseyathome.com Ramsey@Home website] ] (Alpha)
**Rectilinear Crossing Number — finds the lowestcrossing number for a given array of points on a graph. [ [http://dist.ist.tugraz.at/cape5/ Rectilinear Crossing Number website] ] (Beta)
**Riesel Sieve — attempts to solve the Riesel problem. (Beta)
**3x+1@home - studies theCollatz conjecture . [ [http://allprojectstats.com/collatz/ 3x+1@home website] ] (Alpha)
**WEP-M+2 - investigates thefactorization ofMersenne prime numbers. (Beta)* Internet
**DepSpid — builds up a database containing the dependencies between individual web sites and groups of web sites, and collects statistical data about the structure of theWorld Wide Web . [ [http://www.depspid.net/ "DepSpid" website] ] (Alpha)
**Project Neuron — records, observes and analyzes BOINC activity and data with a view to developingmetrics . [ [http://neuron.mine.nu/neuron/ "Project Neuron" website] ] (Beta)* Cryptography
**SHA-1 Collision Search - searches for a collision in theSHA1 hash function . [ [http://boinc.iaik.tugraz.at/sha1_coll_search/ "SHA-1 Collision Search" website] ] (Alpha)* Games
**Chess960@Home — studiesChess960 in order to develop some basics of theory in this chess variant. (Alpha)
**Eternity2.net - searches for a solution to theEternity II puzzle . [ [http://eternity2.net/ "Eternity2.net" website] ] (Alpha)
**NQueens@Home - simulates theeight queens puzzle . [ [http://nqueens.ing.udec.cl/ "NQueens@Home" website] ] (Alpha)
**pPot Tables - computes relative handstrength and 1-card lookahead positive potential for all possible card combinations in Texas hold 'em [ [http://www.init1.net/pPotTables/ "pPot Tables" website] ] (Alpha)
**Project Sudoku - searches for the smallest possible start configuration ofSudoku . [ [http://dist2.ist.tugraz.at/sudoku/ "Project Sudoku" website] ] (Alpha)* Art
**BURP — to develop a publicly distributed system for rendering 3D animations. (Alpha)
**RenderFarm@Home — a publicly distributed system for rendering. [ [http://www.renderfarmathome.com.ar/ "RenderFarm@Home" website] ] (Alpha)* Biology
**Artificial Intelligence System — simulates the human brain, complete withartificial consciousness andartificial general intelligence . (Alpha)
**Docking@Home — models protein-ligand docking. [ [http://docking.utep.edu/ "Docking@Home" website] ] (Beta)
**Genetic Life - studies theevolution ofartificial life . [ [http://genlife.is-a-geek.org/genlife/ "Genetic Life" website] ] (Beta)
**GPUGRID.net - Full-atommolecular biology simulations, specially optimized for the Cell microprocessor inPlayStation 3 , andNvidia graphics processing unit s. [ [http://www.gpugrid.net/ "GPUGRID.net" website] ] (Beta)
**Hydrogen@Home - searches for the most efficient method of producingbiohydrogen . [ [http://hydrogenathome.org/ Hydrogen@Home website] ] (Alpha)
**The Lattice Project — studies a variety of problems in biology. (Beta)
**MindModeling@Home - buildscognitive model s of the human mind. (Beta)
**Predictor@home — uses homology modeling to compare proteins of known structure with similar, but lesser known, proteins, and then constructs predictions for those proteins. (Alpha)
**Proteins@home — deduces DNA sequence, given a protein. (Alpha)
**RALPH@home —Rosetta@home official alpha test project.
**SciLINC — indexes a digitised library of plant species. [ [http://www.scilinc.org/ "SciLINC" website] ] [ [http://www.botanicus.org/Scilinc.aspx Botanicus.org description of SciLINC] ] (Alpha)
**Superlink@Technion — usesgenetic linkage analysis to identify genes that are responsible forgenetic disorder s. [ [http://cbl-link02.cs.technion.ac.il/superlinkattechnion/ "Superlink@Technion" website] ] (Beta)
**Virtual Prairie models the behavior of clonal colonies in aprairie ecosystem. [ [http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/ "Virtual Prairie" website] ] (Alpha)* Astronomy
**Cosmology@Home — searches for the model that best describes ouruniverse and finds the range ofphysical cosmology models that agree with the available data. (Beta)
**Milkyway@home — uses data from theSloan Digital Sky Survey to deduce the structure of theMilky Way galaxy. [ [http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/ "Milkyway@home" website] ] (Alpha)
**Orbit@home — monitoring the impact hazard posed bynear-Earth object s. (Alpha)
**SETI@home beta — is currently the test environment forSETI@home programs destined for the main project.* Physics
**Leiden Classical — Generalclassical mechanics grid for any scientist or science student. [ [http://boinc.gorlaeus.net/ "Leiden Classical" website] ] (Beta)
**LHC@home Alpha —LHC@Home official alpha test project. [ [http://lhcathome-alpha.cern.ch/ LHC@home website] ] (Closed Alpha)
**Magnetism@home - studies themagnetization of materials innanotechnology . [ [http://kinetic.dnsalias.org/magnetism/index.php "Magnetism@home" website] ] (Alpha)
**Nano-Hive@Home — simulates large-scalenanotechnology systems. (Alpha)
**Pirates@home — currently being used to test BOINC's forum software for possible use by another project:Interactions in Understanding the Universe .
**RND@home - calculates the most efficient arrangement of radio antennas, treating it as anNP-hard optimization problem, and using thepopulation-based incremental learning algorithm . [ [http://arcoboinc.unex.es/rnd/ "RND@home" website] ] (Alpha)
**Spinhenge@Home — models the spin ofelementary particles using the principles ofquantum mechanics . (Beta)
**μFluids@Home — simulatestwo-phase flow inmicrogravity andmicrofluidics problems. (Beta)* Earth Sciences
**APS@Home — examines the effects of atmospheric dispersion as it relates to the accuracy of measurements used in climate prediction. [ [http://www.apsathome.org/ "APS@Home" website] ] (Alpha)
**Quake-Catcher Network — usesaccelerometer s in, or attached to, internet-connected computers to detectearthquakes . (Alpha)* Unspecialized Projects
**Ibercivis - currently studiesnuclear fusion ,protein docking , andmaterials science (Alpha)
**Second Computing - the first application assessesbiopolymer dynamics. [ [http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/index.html "Second Computing" website"] ] (Alpha)
**Yoyo@home - finds optimalGolomb ruler s using the OGR application fromdistributed.net , optimises the design of a particle collider which will be used to measure the mass ofneutrino s, and addresses fundamental questions aboutevolution andpopulation genetics .. [ [http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/ "Yoyo@home" website] ] (Beta)Performance of BOINC projects:
*over 1,300,000 participants
*over 2,800,000 computers
*over 1.2 PetaFLOPS (more than supercomputerBlue Gene ) [http://www.boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=bo]
*over 12 Petabytes of free disk space
*SETI@home: 3.4 million years of computing time (January 2008)Distributed.net
Distributed.net runs several projects:
* Search for optimalGolomb ruler s
* Try to breakRC5 -72 encryption.Parabon Computation
The Parabon Computation client uses a Java VM technology, and is commercial in nature.
*Compute Against Cancer — cancer researchWorld Community Grid
The
World Community Grid is an IBM philanthropic initiative which aims to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. It utilizes theBOINC platform.Active Projects
* Human Proteome Folding Project - Phase 2 — predicting functions of proteins in conjunction with
rosetta@home .
*FightAIDS@Home — identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to blockHIV protease .
*Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together — uncover novel drugs to curedengue hemorrhagic fever ,hepatitis C ,West Nile encephalitis , andYellow fever .
*Help Conquer Cancer — improve the results of proteinX-ray crystallography in order to increase understanding of cancer and its treatment.
*Nutritious Rice for the World — Predict the protein structures of rice in order to help rice breeders create more abundant, resilient and nutritious harvests.Upcoming Projects
*
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2 (Starting in 2008)Completed Projects
*
AfricanClimate@Home — develop more accurate climate models of specific regions inAfrica .
*Cuboid simulation project (important for industry, biophysics and statistics) [http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/cm/cmt/cuboid] You roll a six-sided die with parallel faces but non-equal edge lengths. What is theprobability to land on each surface ?
*Genome Comparison — finding all possible similarities between predicted proteins and all known genome sequences decoded to date.
*Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Phase I (UD.EXE version only)
*Help Defeat Cancer — analyzestissue microarray s of breast, head, and neck cancers.
* Smallpox ResearchCustom/Uncategorized Platforms
Custom software encompasses distributed computing projects that do not make use of a third-party generic client-server infrastructure or which use one other than those listed above.
Active projects
* Mathematics
**15k Search [http://www.15k.us] Automated search for large titanicprime number s, of special forms.
**Background Pi [http://sourceforge.net/projects/backpi] Computes decimal digits ofpi using digit extraction method.
** GIMPS — Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, dedicated to finding ever largerMersenne prime s.
**NFSNET — uses the Number Field Sieve to factor increasingly large integers.
**PiSegment — Chinese Volunteer Computing Project with the dual purpose of looking for a large number of digits for the numberPi and making Volunteer Computing more popular in China. Only a Windows client only at this time though.
**Seventeen or Bust — attempts to find prime numbers in 17sequence s, to solve theSierpinski problem . So far primes in 11 sequences have been found.
**Wieferich@Home — searches for newWieferich prime s
* Internet
**AssessGRID [http://www.assessgrid.eu/] Addresses obstacles to a wide adoption of Grid technologies by bringing risk management and assessment to this field, enabling use of Grid computing in business and society.
**A-Ware [http://www.a-ware-project.eu/] will develop a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology to give easy access to Grid resources.
**BREIN — uses theSemantic Web and Multi-agent Systems to build simple and reliable Grid systems forbusiness . [http://www.eu-brein.com/]
**Cohesion Platform [http://www.cohesion.de/cms] is a Java-based modular Peer-to-Peer multi-application Desktop Grid computing platform for irregularly structured problems developed at the University of Tübingen (Germany).
**DIMES — is a distributed computing project which maps the structure and evolution of theInternet infrastructure , allowing users to see how the Internet looks from their home.
**Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
**GridCOMP [http://gridcomp.ercim.org/] — provides an advanced component platform for an effective invisible Grid.
**GridECON [http://www.gridecon.eu/] takes a user-oriented perspective and creates solutions to grid challenges to promote the wide-spread use of grids.
** Hours — Ongoing projectHarmOny and Useful Resource Sharing . Attempts to make use of the trust management and network economics to implement the heterogeneous resource sharing. Currently focusing on the resource allocation in the science grid like Teragrid and OSG. This project is run by theMIST group of Computer Science atWayne State University . [http://mist.cs.wayne.edu/hours.html/]
** JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
** Legion — Grid computing platform developed at the University of Virginia.
** Majestic-12 — Uses a distributedweb crawler program to index web sites for a distributed search engine. [http://www.majestic12.co.uk/]
**NESSI-GRID [http://www.nessi-europe.com/] aims to provide a unified view for European research in Services Architectures and Software Infrastructures that will define technologies, strategies and deployment policies fostering new, open, industrial solutions and societal applications that enhance the safety, security and well-being of citizens.
**OMII-Europe [http://omii-europe.org/] an EU-funded project which has been established to source key software components that can interoperate across several heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.
**OMII-UK [http://www.omii.ac.uk/] provides free Open Source software and support to enable a sustained future for the UK e-Research community.
**OurGrid — aims to deliver grid technology that can be used today by current users to solve present problems. To achieve this goal, OurGrid chooses a different trade-off compared to most grid projects. It forfeits supporting arbitrary applications in favor of supporting onlyBag-of-Tasks applications.
**ScottNet NCG — This is a distributed neural computing grid. A private commercial effort in continuous operation since 1995. This system performs a series of functions including data synchronization amongst databases, mainframe systems, and other data repositories. E-Commerce transaction processing, automated research and data retrieval, content analysis, web site monitoring, scripted and dynamic user emulation, shipping and fulfillment API integration and management, RSS and NNTP monitoring and analysis, real time security enforcement, and backup / restore functionality. [http://www.brettscott.com/NeuralComputing.asp]
* Biology
**Bio4All ToolKits - genetic annotation tools for responsible research [ [http://www.bio4all.tk "www.Bio4All.Tk" website] ]
**CommunityTSC - design drugs to treat patients afflicted withTuberous sclerosis .
**D2OL — works to discover drug candidates againstAnthrax ,Smallpox ,Ebola andSARS and other potentially devastating infectious diseases. (Uses Java VM)
**Folding@Home — run byStanford University and whose goal is to understand why proteins misfold.
**SharkGrid — is a small grid forwhale shark (Rhincdon typus) photo-identification. [ [http://www.sharkgrid.org/ "sharkGrid" website] ]
* Chemistry
**Chemomentum [http://www.chemomentum.org/] evaluation andrisk assessment of chemicals.
* Earth Sciences
**Climateprediction.net — seeks to forecast theclimate of theEarth in the 21st century. "The original windows client is in process of being retired. At this time the windows client is used for Open University classes only."
* Art
**Electric Sheep — Anopen source screen-saver for animating and evolving abstract animations.
* Physics
**EON — run byThe University of Texas at Austin and whose goal is to understandcondensed matter physics . EON usesCosm client architecture and alsoFida . [http://eon.cm.utexas.edu/]
**Galaxy Zoo -- Classification of galaxy types from theSloan Digital Sky Survey .
**Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet.
* Cryptography
**freerainbowtables.com — generating perfectrainbow table s. [ [http://www.freerainbowtables.com/ "freerainbowtables" website] ]
**M4 Project [http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html] - Decrypting Enigma messages from World War II.
* Miscellaneous
**BEinGRID — Business Experiments in Grid. Also See [http://www.gridipedia.eu/ Gridipedia]
**Gstock — Investment Strategy Search, dedicated to finding ever bettertechnical analysis strategies.
**MoneyBee — Generatesstock forecast s by application of artificial intelligence with the aid of artificial neural networks.
**Perplex City — anAlternate Reality Game created by the British companyMind Candy , features puzzle cards which can be solved to earn points on a leaderboard and earn clues to help understand the game. One of these cards, "The 13th Labour", features what players have determined to be a block ofRC5 -64bit encryption, which is now being brute-forced, using a distributed computing client created by one player.
**SoundExpert [http://www.soundexpert.info] — human distributed project estimates sound quality of different audio devices and technologies (lossy encoders at the moment only, such as mp3, aac, wma, etc.) by means of blind listening tests conducted over the internet.
**StrataGenie [http://www.stratagenie.com] — searches for trading strategies in intraday stock market data and distributes trading signals to subscribers.Completed projects
*
OGR-24 - part ofDistributed.net . Verified already known OGR-24 line.
*BBC Climate Change Experiment (part of Climateprediction.net)
*DHEP [http://dhep.dbestern.com/] — automatically design self-diagnosing hardware (now closed).
*Distributed Folding — was doing work similar to that ofFolding@home , but with agenetic algorithm to attempt to improve the results over time. Distributed Folding closed onOctober 5 ,2004 .
*FAFNER
*Find-a-drug — a non-profit organisation using Internet-based computing for drug discovery. Preliminary results from the Cancer and HIV projects are very promising. Project ended onDecember 16 ,2005 .
*HashClash@home — extends both theoretical and experimental results on collision generation for theMD5 andSHA1 hash functions .
*Lifemapper — Attempted to build global archive of biological species distributions.
*PiHex — found the 40 billionth bit ofPi onSeptember 11 ,2000 .
*Screensaver Lifesaver — A project being carried out by theUniversity of Oxford 'sCentre for Computational Drug Discovery , sponsored by theNFCR , attempts to find cures for various cancers.
*ZetaGrid — verification of Riemann's hypothesis.
*Grid.org — Agrid computing platform funded by United Devices as a testbed for its own software, hosting large scale research studies. Closed on April 27, 2007.
*United Devices Cancer Research Project — find drugs forpancreatic cancer andleukemia . Closed on April 27, 2007.
*XtremLab — measures the free resources available on desktop PC's involved in large-scale distributed computing. Results will be used to improve the design of systems, such as BOINC. (Alpha)Abandoned projects
These projects were either abandoned outright or in some cases merged with other larger ongoing projects.
*MD5CRK — Attempted to crack the commonly usedcryptographic hash function MD5 . This project endedAugust 24 ,2004 due to findings by Wang, Feng, Lai, and Yu.
*Popular Power
* Entropia
*Genome@home — due to lack of funding, merged withFolding@home .
* [http://www.blisstonia.com/software/TivoCrack TivoCrack]Upcoming projects
*
Storage@home — distributed storage infrastructure developed to solve the problem of backing up and sharing petabytes of scientific results using a distributed model of volunteer managed hosts. Data is maintained by a mixture of replication and monitoring, with repairs done as needed.Volunteer distributed computing projects
Popular projects in volunteer distributed computing include [cite paper|author=
David P. Anderson |title=A Million Years of Computing|url=http://www.ngp.org.sg/seminars/Slides/DavidAnderson-Seminar@NLB.pdf|date=2005-05-23|accessdate=2006-08-11] :Physical infrastructure projects
These projects attempt to make large physical computation infrastructures available for researchers to use:
* [http://www.teragrid.org/ Teragrid]
* [http://www.opensciencegrid.org/ Open Science Grid]
* [http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html VirginiaTech]
* [http://dcc.irb.hr Institut Ruđer Bošković (IRB) Debian Cluster Components]
* [http://www.sara.nl/userinfo/lisa/usage/batch/index.html SARA Computing and Networking Services in Netherlands]
*Berkeley NOW Project Other distributed computing software platforms
The following are generic software platforms or infrastructures used to implement some of the projects listed in the previous section.
* [http://www.alchemi.net Alchemi] — A .NET-based system for building enterprise Grids and applications.
* Amoeba — distributed operating system that is designed for distributed computing tasks.
*Base One Foundation Component Library — RAD framework fordatabase-centric distributed computing.
*Beowulf clusters —Linux based parallel computing using commodity hardware.
* Condor — a flexible high-throughput distributed computing scheduler
* [http://dcez.emporia.edu DCEZ] — Simple to set up and use platform to perform distributed computing with a minimum of infrastructure.
*Distributed object s — systems likeCORBA , Microsoft D/COM,Java RMI , and others that try to mapobject oriented design onto the network.
*DragonFly BSD — an operating system aiming to support SSI clustering
* [http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/services/synfiniway Fujitsu SynfiniWay] — Grid middleware that is used to optimize data and execution processes.
*Globus Toolkit — an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications
* [http://www.GreenTeaTech.com GreenTea Software] — a Java-based P2P generic distributed network computing platform that transmits code and data on-demand to run on heterogeneous OS's.
* [http://www.gridbus.org Gridbus Toolkit] — an open source software toolkit used for building market-oriented Grid systems and applications
*Grid MP — an infrastructure created byUnited Devices , used to rungrid.org , and is one of the infrastructures used byWorld Community Grid .
* [http://www.jppf.org JPPF] — an open source computational grid toolkit focused on performance and ease of use
* [http://jstm.sourceforge.net JSTM] — uses a javaSoftware Transactional Memory implementation for distributed object replication.
*Popular Power — (Defunct) building a platform for Internet-wide distributed computing.
*ProActive ProActive is a Java middleware (part of theObjectWeb consortium, with Open Source code) for parallel, distributed and multi-threaded computing.
*RPyC — Remote Python Call, a platform for building distributed applications.
*Sun Grid Engine — a distributed resource management system, similar to Condor
*UNICORE — an open source software platform for supporting Grid systems and applications
* Vaakya — software developed by Vaakya Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a Bangalore-based company. It has its own language and different frameworks (e.g. business application components, handheld devices, 3D graphics) that allow ISVs to develop applications, particularly for businesses, that run entirely on premises on ordinary work stations, not expensive servers.
* [http://www.xoreax.com/technology_xge.htm XGE] — a Windows-based product which distributes tasks on a local network by virtualizing filesystem access.
*Xgrid — software developed by Apple'sAdvanced Computation Group .Comparison of cluster software References
External links
* [http://distributedcomputing.info/ DistributedComputing.info — lists ongoing, future and past projects]
* [http://www.hyper.net/dc-howto.html How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity]
* [http://www.volunteerathome.com/ Volunteer@Home.com — All about volunteer computing]
* [http://www.kd-web.info/clanky.php Flash tutorials - how to attach BOINC projects (English, Czech)]
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