List of distributed computing projects
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A list of distributed computing projects.
[edit] 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.
- Africa@home — solve African humanitarian and health problems.
- BBC Climate Change Experiment
- Chess960@Home [1] — generate a huge database of Chess960 games.
- Climateprediction.net — forecast the climate of the Earth in the 21st century.
- Einstein@Home — Find gravitational waves
- Leiden Classical [2] — general Classical Dynamics where, besides science, students and scientists the participants can generate their own work units
- LHC@home — help calibrate the LHC at CERN
- Nano-Hive@Home [http://www.nanohive-1.org/atHome — Study nanosystems that can't be simulated and analysed through normal means.
- Orbit@home — uses the Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis framework to monitor the impact hazard posed by Near-Earth objects.
- PlanetQuest — find undiscovered celestial bodies within our galaxy.
- Predictor@home — predict protein structures from their sequences
- PrimeGrid — test an implementation of BOINC written in Perl, and crack RSA-768.
- Proteins@home — structure prediction on a genomic scale based at Ecole Polytechnique France
- QMC@Home — study the structure and reactivity of molecules using quantum chemistry.
- RieselSieve [3] — help the Riesel Sieve project by sieving & testing possible candidates
- Rosetta@home — predict and design protein structures.
- SETI@home — search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI).
- SIMAP — create a database of protein similarities
- Spinhenge@Home — simulating spindynamic in magnetic molecules
- SZTAKI Desktop Grid — search for generalized binary number systems
- TANPAKU [4] — aiming to predict protein structures
Performance of BOINC projects:
- over 940,000 participants
- over 1,700,000 computers
- over 550 TeraFLOPS (more than supercomputer BlueGene)[5]
- over 12 Petabytes of free disk space
- SETI@home: 2.7 million years of computer time (2006)
[edit] Distributed.net
Distributed.net runs several projects:
- Search for optimal Golomb rulers
- Try to break RC5-72 encryption.
[edit] Parabon Computation
The Parabon Computation client uses a Java VM technology, and is commercial in nature.
- ComputeAgainstCancer [6] — cancer research
[edit] United Devices
- Grid.org — A grid computing platform funded by United Devices as a testbed for its own software, hosting large scale research studies.
- United Devices Cancer Research Project — find drugs for pancreatic cancer and leukemia.
[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 both the BOINC and United Devices platforms.
- FightAIDS@Home — tests potential drug molecule's ability to inhibit HIV protease.
- Human Proteome Folding Project — predicting functions of proteins in conjunction with rosetta@home.
- Help Defeat Cancer [7] — analyzes tissue microarrays of breast, head, and neck cancers.
- Genome Comparison — finding all possible similarities between predicted proteins and all known genome sequences decoded to date.
[edit] Custom platforms
Custom software encompasses distributed computing projects that do not make use of a third-party generic client-server infrastructure.
[edit] Active projects
- Background Pi [8] Computes decimal digits of pi using digit extraction method.
- 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.
- CommunityTSC [9] uses Sengent’s CommunityOS to help make drugs to treat patients with TSC.
- Cuboid simulation project (important for industry, biophysics and statistics) [10]
- D2OL — works to discover drug candidates against Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola and SARS and other potentially devastating infectious diseases.
- 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.
- Electric Sheep — An open source screen-saver for animating and evolving abstract animations.
- Evolution@Home — addressing fundamental questions about evolution and population genetics.
- Folding@home [11] — run by Stanford University and whose goal is to understand why proteins misfold. Folding@home uses Cosm client architecture with broad set of scientific cores [12].
- GIMPS — Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, dedicated to finding ever larger Mersenne primes.
- Gstock — Investment Strategy Search, dedicated to finding ever better Technical Analysis strategies.
- JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
- Majestic-12 — Uses a distributed web crawler program to index web sites for a distributed search engine.
- MoneyBee [13] — Generates stock forecasts by application of artificial intelligence with the aid of artificial neural networks.
- Muon1 [14] — Optimises the design of a particle collider which will be used to measure the mass of neutrinos.
- NFSNET — uses the Number Field Sieve to factor increasingly large integers.
- OurGrid [15] — 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.
- 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; available here.
- 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 only at this time though.
- The Riesel Sieve Project [16] — attempts to solve the Riesel problem by finding prime numbers. As of October 2005 they have found 26 primes and are attempting to find 75 more.
- Screensaver Lifesaver — A project being carried out by Oxford University's Centre for Computational Drug Discovery, sponsored by the NFCR, attempts to find cures for various cancers.
- Seventeen or Bust — attempts to find prime numbers in 17 sequences, to solve the Sierpinski problem. So far primes in 9 sequences have been found.
- Legion — Grid computing platform being developed at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
- Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet
- EON — run by The University of Texas at Austin and whose goal is to understand matter condensing. EON uses Cosm client architecture and also fida. [17]
- 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.[18]
- 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 we are 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. [19]
[edit] Completed projects
- DHEP [20] — automatically design self-diagnosing hardware.
- Distributed Folding [21] — 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.
- Lifemapper — Attempted to build global archive of biological species distributions.
- PiHex — found the 40 billionth bit of Pi on September 11, 2000.
- ZetaGrid — verification of Riemann's hypothesis.
[edit] Abandoned projects
- 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[22].
- Popular Power
- Entropia
- Genome@home — due to lack of funding, merged with Folding@home.
[edit] Volunteer distributed computing projects
Popular projects in volunteer distributed computing include[1] :
| Project | Start | Where | Area | Peak_#hosts | Current status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GIMPS | 1994 | ? | mathematics | 10,000 | active |
| distributed.net | 1997 | ? | cryptography | 100,000 | active |
| SETI@home Classic | 1999 | University of California, Berkeley | SETI | 650,000 | ? |
| Electric Sheep | 1999 | ? | art | 40,000 | active |
| Folding@home | 2000 | Stanford University | biology | 200,000 | active |
| Grid.org | 2002 | philanthropic by United Devices | biomedicine, other | 917,231 | active |
| Climateprediction.net | 2003 | University of Oxford | climate change | 150,000 | active |
| LHC@home | 2004 | CERN | physics | 60,000 | active |
| World Community Grid | 2004 | philanthropic by IBM | biomedicine, other | 271,799 | active |
| Einstein@home | 2005 | LIGO | astrophysics | 200,000 | active |
| SETI@home BOINC | 2004 | University of California, Berkeley | SETI | 850,000 | active |
| Rosetta@home | 2005 | University of Washington | biology | 100,000 | active |
[edit] Physical infrastructure projects
These projects attempt to make large physical computation infrastructures available for researchers to use:
- Teragrid
- Open Science Grid
- VirginiaTech
- Institut Ruđer Bošković (IRB) Debian Cluster Components
- SARA Computing and Networking Services in Netherlands
- Berkeley NOW Project
[edit] EU funded distributed computing research
The European Union (EU) values distributed computing as part of the EU's overall quality of life governancy philosophy. Thus, the EU has funded many distributed computing research projects. All of these projects use customized software in order for the research to be conducted and have varying levels of public access to project research.
- Akogrimo [23] — "Access to Knowledge through the Grid in a mobile World".
- BEinGRID [24] — "Business Experiments in GRID".
- CoreGRID [25] — "European Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications for large scale distributed, Grid and Peer-to-Peer Technologies"
- DataMiningGrid [26] — "Data Mining Tools and Services for Grid Computing Environments".
- EELA [27] —E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America.
- Grid4all [28] — "Self-* Grid: Dynamic Virtual Organizations for schools, families, and all".
- Grid Provenance [29] — addressing "the enabling and supporting of Provenance in Grids for Complex Problems".
- HPC4U [30] — "Highly Predictable Cluster for Internet-Grids".
- InteliGrid [31] — "InteroperabilIty of Virtual Organisations on Complex Semantic Grid".
- K-WF Grid [32] — "Knowledge-based Workflow System for Grid Applications".
- MediGrid [33] — addressing development of "Mediterranean Grid of Natural Hazards Data and Models".
- NextGRID [34] — addressing the development of architectures for the "Next Generation Grid".
- OntoGrid [35] — paving the way for knowledgeable Grid services and systems.
- SIMDAT [36] — "Data Grids for Process and Product Development using Numerical Simulation and Knowledge Discovery".
- SORMA [37] — "Self-Organizing ICT Resource Management".
- UniGridS [38] — addressing development of "Uniform Interface to Grid Services".
[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.
- Acute — Distributed functional programming with migration based on OCaml.
- Amoeba — distributed operating system that is designed for distributed computing tasks.
- Beowulf clusters — Linux based parallel computing using commodity hardware.
- Condor — a flexible high-throughput distributed computing scheduler
- Distributed objects — systems like CORBA, Microsoft D/COM, Java RMI, and others that try to map object oriented design onto the network.
- 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
- Grid MP — an infrastructure created by United Devices, used to run grid.org, and is one of the infrastructures used by World Community Grid.
- Popular Power — (Defunct) building a platform for Internet-wide distributed computing.
- Sun GridEngine — a distributed resource management system, similar to Condor
- Xgrid — software developed by Apple's Advanced Computation Group.
[edit] References
- ^ David P. Anderson (2005-05-23). "A Million Years of Computing". Retrieved on 2006-08-11.
