List of distributed computing projects

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A list of distributed computing projects.

[edit] The fastest Distributed Computers

The PlayStation 3 Folding@home client displays a 3D model of the protein being simulated

• Folding@Home is of April 2009 sustaining over 8.1 PFLOPS ^[1], the first computing project of any kind to cross the four petaFLOPS milestone. This level of performance is primarily enabled by the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3 and powerful GPU units.^[2]
• The entire BOINC averages over 1.5 PFLOPS as of March 15, 2009^[3].
• SETI@Home computes data averages more than 528 TFLOPS^[4]
• Einstein@Home is crunching more than 150 TFLOPS^[5]
• As of August 2008^[update], GIMPS is sustaining 27 TFLOPS.^[6]

Intel Corporation has recently unveiled the experimental multi-core POLARIS chip, which achieves 1 TFLOPS at 3.13 GHz. The 80-core chip can increase this result to 2 TFLOPS at 6.26 GHz, although the thermal dissipation at this frequency exceeds 190 watts^[7].

As of 2008, the fastest PC processors (quad-core) perform over 70 GFLOPS (Intel Core i7 965 XE) in double precision^[8]. GPUs are considerably more powerful, for example, in the GeForce 200 Series the nVidia GTX 280 performs around 933 GFLOPS on 240 processing elements in single precision calculations^[9], and that while GPUs are highly efficient at single precision calculations they are not as flexible as a general purpose CPUs in double precision operations.

[edit] Cycle Scavenging Infrastructure

[edit] Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), originally developed to support SETI@home, became useful as a platform for several distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.^[10]

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is currently the most popular volunteer-based distributed computing platform as of April 2009.^[11][12]

[edit] Active Projects

• Biology
  • Cels@Home - studies how diseases spread through a body.^[13]
  • Malaria Control — for stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of malaria.
  • POEM@Home — models protein folding using Anfinsen's dogma.^[14]
  • Rosetta@home — tests the assembly of specific proteins, using appropriate fragments of better-known proteins.
  • SIMAP — compiles a database of protein similarities using the FASTA algorithm, and protein domains using InterPro.

• Earth Sciences
  • Climateprediction.net — tries to produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century.

• Physics and Astronomy
  • BRaTS@Home — to study gravitational lensing.^[15]
  • Einstein@Home — uses data from LIGO and GEO 600 to detect gravitational waves.
  • LHC@home — simulates particles travelling in the Large Hadron Collider.
  • QMC@Home — uses Quantum Monte Carlo to predict molecular geometry.
  • SETI@home — Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence

• Mathematics
  • ABC@Home — attempt to solve the ABC conjecture problem.
  • SZTAKI Desktop Grid — searches for generalized binary number systems.

[edit] Upcoming Projects

These projects are considered to be in the Alpha or Beta development stages.

• Mathematics
  • Distributed Exact Cover Solver - solves exact cover problems using a version of the Dancing Links algorithm.^[16] (Alpha)
  • PrimeGrid — searches for megaprimes. (Beta)
  • Ramsey@Home - searches for new lower bounds of Ramsey numbers^[17] (Alpha)
  • Rectilinear Crossing Number — finds the lowest crossing number for a given array of points on a graph.^[18] (Beta)
  • Riesel Sieve — attempts to solve the Riesel problem. (Beta)
  • WEP-M+2 - investigates the factorization of Mersenne prime numbers. (Beta)

• Internet
  • Project Neuron — records, observes and analyzes BOINC activity and data with a view to developing metrics.^[19] (Beta)

• Cryptography
  • SHA-1 Collision Search - searches for a collision in the SHA1 hash function.^[20] (Alpha)

• Games
  • Chess960@Home — studies Chess960 in order to develop some basics of theory in this chess variant. (Alpha)
  • Eternity2.net - searches for a solution to the Eternity II puzzle.^[21] (Alpha)
  • NQueens@Home - simulates the eight queens puzzle.^[22] (Alpha)
  • pPot Tables - computes relative handstrength and 1-card lookahead positive potential for all possible card combinations in Texas hold 'em^[23] (Alpha)
  • Project Sudoku - searches for the smallest possible start configuration of Sudoku.^[24] (Alpha)

• Art
  • BURP — to develop a publicly distributed system for rendering 3D animations. (Alpha)
  • RenderFarm@Home — a publicly distributed system for rendering.^[25] (Alpha)

• Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence System — simulates the human brain, complete with artificial consciousness and artificial general intelligence. (Alpha)
  • FreeHAL@home - to parse and convert big open source semantic nets for use in FreeHAL.^[26] (Alpha)
  • MindModeling@Home - builds cognitive models of the human mind. (Beta)

• Biology
  • Docking@Home — models protein-ligand docking.^[27] (Beta)
  • Genetic Life - studies the evolution of artificial life.^[28] (Beta)
  • GPUGRID.net - Full-atom molecular biology simulations, specially optimized for the Cell microprocessor in PlayStation 3, and Nvidia graphics processing units.^[29] (Beta)
  • Hydrogen@Home - searches for the most efficient method of producing biohydrogen.^[30] (Alpha)
  • The Lattice Project — studies a variety of problems in biology. (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.^[31][32] (Alpha)
  • Superlink@Technion — uses genetic linkage analysis to identify genes that are responsible for genetic disorders.^[33] (Beta)
  • Virtual Prairie models the behavior of clonal colonies in a prairie ecosystem.^[34] (Alpha)

• Astronomy
  • Cosmology@Home — searches for the model that best describes our universe and finds the range of physical cosmology models that agree with the available data. (Beta)
  • Milkyway@home — uses data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to deduce the structure of the Milky Way galaxy.^[35] (Alpha)
  • Orbit@home — monitoring the impact hazard posed by near-Earth objects. (Alpha)
  • SETI@home beta — is currently the test environment for SETI@home programs destined for the main project.

• Physics
  • AQUA@home - predicts the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers.^[36] (Alpha)
  • Leiden Classical — General classical mechanics grid for any scientist or science student.^[37] (Beta)
  • LHC@home Alpha — LHC@Home official alpha test project.^[38]
  • Magnetism@home - studies the magnetization of materials in nanotechnology.^[39] (Alpha)
  • Nano-Hive@Home — simulates large-scale nanotechnology 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 an NP-hard optimization problem, and using the population-based incremental learning algorithm.^[40] (Alpha)
  • Spinhenge@Home — models the spin of elementary particles using the principles of quantum mechanics. (Beta)
  • μFluids@Home — simulates two-phase flow in microgravity and microfluidics problems. (Beta)

• Earth Sciences
  • APS@Home — examines the effects of atmospheric dispersion as it relates to the accuracy of measurements used in climate prediction.^[41] (Alpha)
  • Quake-Catcher Network — uses accelerometers in, or attached to, internet-connected computers to detect earthquakes. (Alpha)

• Unspecialized Projects
  • Ibercivis — Studies nuclear fusion, materials science and protein docking
  • Second Computing — the first application assesses biopolymer dynamics.^[42] (Alpha)
  • Yoyo@home — finds optimal Golomb rulers using the OGR application from distributed.net, optimises the design of a particle collider which will be used to measure the mass of neutrinos, and addresses fundamental questions about evolution and population genetics..^[43] (Beta)

Performance of BOINC projects:

• over 1,300,000 participants
• over 2,800,000 computers
• over 1.2 PetaFLOPS (more than supercomputer Blue Gene) [1]
• over 12 Petabytes of free disk space
• SETI@home: 3.4 million years of computing time (January 2008)

[edit] Distributed.net

Distributed.net runs several projects:

• Search for optimal Golomb rulers
• Try to break RC5-72 encryption.

[edit] World Community Grid

The World Community Grid is an IBM philanthropic initiative which aims to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. It utilizes the BOINC platform.

[edit] 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 block HIV protease.
• Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together — uncover novel drugs to cure dengue hemorrhagic fever, hepatitis C, West Nile encephalitis, and Yellow fever.
• Help Conquer Cancer — improve the results of protein X-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.
• The Clean Energy Project[2][3] — Trying to find the best organic substances for the next generation's solar cells and storing energy
• Help Fight Childhood Cancer [4] The mission of the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project is to find drugs that can disable three particular proteins associated with neuroblastoma, one of the most frequently occurring solid tumors in children. Identifying these drugs could potentially make the disease much more curable when combined with chemotherapy treatment.

[edit] Upcoming Projects

• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2 (Starting in 2009)

[edit] Completed Projects

• AfricanClimate@Home — develop more accurate climate models of specific regions in Africa.
• Cuboid simulation project (important for industry, biophysics and statistics) [5] You roll a six-sided die with parallel faces but non-equal edge lengths. What is the probability 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 — analyzes tissue microarrays of breast, head, and neck cancers.
• Smallpox Research

[edit] Commercial Cycle Scavengers

[edit] Gomez Peer

Commercial distributed computing project that uses peers' computers to measure the real-world performance of websites. They pay the active peers 0.10$ for being online more than 20 hours a day and 0.0005$ for each processing minute. Each peer can install their program on more than one computer and sum up online and processing time. Payments are distributed by PayPal (you must have a minimum of $5 to get a payment).

[edit] Parabon Computation

The Parabon Computation client uses a Java VM technology, and is commercial in nature.

• Compute Against Cancer — cancer research

[edit] Custom/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.

Note that not all of these projects use cycle-scavenging technology; some instead focus on more traditional remote-access-to-HPC approaches.

[edit] Active projects

• Mathematics
  • Background Pi [6] Computes decimal digits of pi using digit extraction method.
  • GIMPS — Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, dedicated to finding ever larger Mersenne primes.
  • 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 number Pi and making Volunteer Computing more popular in China. Only a Windows client available at this time though.
  • Seventeen or Bust — attempts to find prime numbers in 17 sequences, to solve the Sierpinski problem. So far primes in 11 sequences have been found.
  • Wieferich@Home — searches for new Wieferich primes
• Internet
  • AssessGRID [7] 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 [8] will develop a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology to give easy access to Grid resources.
  • BREIN — uses the Semantic Web and Multi-agent Systems to build simple and reliable Grid systems for business.
  • Cohesion Platform [9] 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 the Internet infrastructure, allowing users to see how the Internet looks from their home.
  • Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
  • GridCOMP [10] — provides an advanced component platform for an effective invisible Grid.
  • GridECON [11] takes a user-oriented perspective and creates solutions to grid challenges to promote the widespread use of grids.
  • Hours — Ongoing project HarmOny 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 the MIST group of Computer Science at Wayne State University.[12]
  • JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
  • Legion — Grid computing platform developed at the University of Virginia.
  • Majestic-12 — Uses a distributed web crawler program to index web sites for a distributed search engine.[13]
  • NESSI-GRID [14] 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 is an EU-funded project which has been established to source key software components that can interoperate across several heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.
  • OMII-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 only Bag-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.[15]
• Biology
  • Bio4All ToolKits - genetic annotation tools for responsible research ^[44]
  • CommunityTSC - design drugs to treat patients afflicted with Tuberous sclerosis.
  • D2OL — works to discover drug candidates against Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola and SARS and other potentially devastating infectious diseases. (Uses Java VM)
  • Folding@Home — run by Stanford University and whose goal is to understand why proteins misfold.
  • SharkGrid — is a small grid for whale shark (Rhincdon typus) photo-identification.^[45]
• Chemistry
  • Chemomentum evaluation and risk assessment of chemicals.
• Earth Sciences
  • Climateprediction.net — seeks to forecast the climate of the Earth 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 — An open source screen-saver for animating and evolving abstract animations.
• Physics
  • EON — run by The University of Texas at Austin and whose goal is to understand condensed matter physics. EON uses Cosm client architecture and also Fida. [16]
  • Galaxy Zoo -- Classification of galaxy types from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
  • Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet.
• Cryptography
  • M4 Project [17] - Decrypting Enigma messages from World War II.
• Miscellaneous
  • The CCL Game and The CCL Winter Game Optimal Solution Finder — using brute-force search to find optimal solutions for a Flash clone of The Incredible Machine.
  • BEinGRID — Business Experiments in Grid. Also See Gridipedia
  • Gstock — Investment Strategy Search, dedicated to finding ever better technical analysis strategies.
  • MoneyBee — Generates stock forecasts by application of artificial intelligence with the aid of artificial neural networks.
  • Perplex City — an Alternate Reality Game created by the British company Mind 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 of RC5-64bit encryption, which is now being brute-forced, using a distributed computing client created by one player.
  • SoundExpert [18] — 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 [19] — searches for trading strategies in intraday stock market data and distributes trading signals to subscribers.

[edit] Completed projects

• OGR-25 - part of Distributed.net. Verified already known OGR-25 line.
• OGR-24 - part of Distributed.net. Verified already known OGR-24 line.
• BBC Climate Change Experiment (part of Climateprediction.net)
• DHEP [20] — automatically design self-diagnosing hardware (now closed).
• Distributed Folding — was doing work similar to that of Folding@home, but with a genetic algorithm to attempt to improve the results over time. Distributed Folding closed on October 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 on December 16, 2005.
• HashClash@home — extends both theoretical and experimental results on collision generation for the MD5 and SHA1 hash functions.
• Lifemapper — Attempted to build global archive of biological species distributions.
• PiHex — found the 40 billionth bit of Pi on September 11, 2000.
• Screensaver Lifesaver — A project being carried out by the University of Oxford's Centre for Computational Drug Discovery, sponsored by the NFCR, attempts to find cures for various cancers.
• ZetaGrid — verification of Riemann's hypothesis.
• Grid.org — A grid 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 for pancreatic cancer and leukemia. 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)

[edit] Abandoned projects

These projects were either abandoned outright or in some cases merged with other larger ongoing projects.

• 15k Search [21] — Automated search for large titanic prime numbers, of special forms
• MD5CRK — Attempted to crack the commonly used cryptographic hash function MD5. This project ended August 24, 2004 due to findings by Wang, Feng, Lai, and Yu.^[46]
• Popular Power
• Entropia
• Genome@home — Due to lack of funding, merged with Folding@home
• TivoCrack
• DepSpid — Built up a database containing the dependencies between individual web sites and groups of web sites, and collected statistical data about the structure of the World Wide Web.^[47] (Reached alpha)
• 3x+1@home — Studied the Collatz conjecture.^[48] (Reached alpha)
• TANPAKU — to predict protein structures using Brownian dynamics.
• TSP - Studied the traveling salesman problem.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Volunteer distributed computing projects

Popular projects in volunteer distributed computing include:^{[49][not in citation given]}

[edit] Physical infrastructure projects

These projects attempt to make large physical computation infrastructures available for researchers to use:

• Berkeley NOW Project
• Institut Ruđer Bošković (IRB) Debian Cluster Components
• Open Science Grid
• SARA Computing and Networking Services in Netherlands
• Teragrid
• VirginiaTech

[edit] 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.

• 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 for database-centric distributed computing.
• Beowulf clusters — Linux based parallel computing using commodity hardware.
• Condor — a flexible high-throughput distributed computing scheduler
• DCEZ — Simple to set up and use platform to perform distributed computing with a minimum of infrastructure.
• Distributed objects — systems like CORBA, Microsoft DCOM, Java RMI, and others that try to map object oriented design onto the network.
• DragonFly BSD — an operating system aiming to support SSI clustering
• Globus Toolkit — an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications
• GreenTea Software — a Java-based P2P generic distributed network computing platform that transmits code and data on-demand to run on heterogeneous OS's.
• Gridbus Toolkit — an open source software toolkit used for building market-oriented Grid systems and applications
• Grid MP — an infrastructure created by United Devices, used to run grid.org, and is one of the infrastructures used by World Community Grid.
• JPPF — an open source computational grid toolkit focused on performance and ease of use
• JSTM — uses a java Software 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 the ObjectWeb 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
• SynfiniWay — Fujitsu's middleware with which a virtualised IT framework can be created that provides a uniform and global view of resources within a department, a company, or a company with its suppliers.
• Terracotta — Open source Java clustering - Java extension that provides seamless clustering of plain java code. See also Terracotta Cluster.
• 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.
• XGE — a Windows-based product which distributes tasks on a local network by virtualizing filesystem access.
• Xgrid — software developed by Apple's Advanced Computation Group.

Comparison of cluster software

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• DistributedComputing.info — lists ongoing, future and past projects
• Flash tutorials - how to attach BOINC projects (English) (Czech)
• How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity
• Volunteer@Home.com — All about volunteer computing