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.

Africa@home — solve African humanitarian and health problems.
Chess960@Home ^* — generate a huge database of Chess960 games.
Climateprediction.net — forecast the climate of the Earth in the 21st century.
- BBC Climate Change Experiment
Einstein@Home — Find gravitational waves
Leiden Classical ^* — 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
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.
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home ^* — study the structure and reactivity of molecules using Quantum Chemistry.
Rosetta@home — predict and design protein structures.
SETI@home — search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI).
SZTAKI Desktop Grid — search for generalized binary number systems

Distributed.net

Distributed.net runs several projects:

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

Parabon Computation

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

ComputeAgainstCancer ^* — cancer research

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.

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 — fight HIV.
Human Proteome Folding Project — a collaborative project of World Community Grid and Rosetta@home.

Custom platforms

Custom software encompasses distributed computing projects that do not make use of a third-party generic client-server infrastructure.

Active projects

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 ^* uses Sengent’s CommunityOS to help make drugs to treat patients with TSC.
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 evolving four-dimensional fractals.
Evolution@Home — addressing fundamental questions about evolution and population genetics.
Folding@home — 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 ^*.
GIMPS — Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, dedicated to finding ever larger Mersenne primes.
JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
MoneyBee ^* — Generates stock forecasts by application of artificial intelligence with the aid of artificial neural networks.
Muon1 ^* — 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 ^* — 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.
The Riesel Sieve Project ^* — 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.

Proposed projects

Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet

Completed projects

DHEP ^* — automatically design self-diagnosing hardware.
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.
Genome@home — Folding@home sisterproject. Due to funding, Genome@home was shut down.
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.

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^*.
Popular Power
Entropia

Physical infrastructure projects

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

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 ^* — "Access to Knowledge through the Grid in a mobile World".
BEinGRID ^* — "Business Experiments in Grid".
CoreGRID ^* — "European Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications for large scale distributed, Grid and Peer-to-Peer Technologies"
DataMiningGrid ^* — "Data Mining Tools and Services for Grid Computing Environments".
HPC4U ^* — "Highly Predictable Cluster for Internet-Grids".
InteliGrid ^* — "InteroperabilIty of Virtual Organisations on Complex Semantic Grid".
K-WF Grid ^* — "Knowledge-based Workflow System for Grid Applications".
OntoGrid ^* — paving the way for knowledgeable Grid services and systems.
Grid Provenance ^* — addressing "the enabling and supporting of Provenance in Grids for Complex Problems".
NextGRID ^* — addressing the development of architectures for the "Next Generation Grid".
SIMDAT ^* — "Data Grids for Process and Product Development using Numerical Simulation and Knowledge Discovery".
UniGridS ^* — addressing development of "Uniform Interface to Grid Services".
MediGrid ^* — addressing development of "Mediterranean Grid of Natural Hazards Data and Models".
EELA ^* —E-Insfrastrucutre shared between Europe and Latin America.

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 — a dynamic virtual infrastructure created by United Devices to transform existing computer systems, storage, and networks into a powerful resource used by the United Devices Cancer Research Project, World Community Grid, and other public projects hosted by grid.org.
Moab Grid Suite — a job scheduler for use on clusters and supercomputers.
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.