List of volunteer computing projects

A list of distributed computing projects.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)

BOINC logo

Main article: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform is currently the most popular volunteer-based distributed computing platform.

Active Projects

• Biology
  • Africa@home — solve African humanitarian and health problems.
  • Artificial Intelligence — Reverse Engineering the Brain via large scale Hodgkin-Huxley model simulations.
  • Malaria Control — for stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of Plasmodium falciparum malaria.
  • POEM@Home — models protein folding using Anfinsen's dogma.
  • Predictor@home — uses homology modeling to identify proteins of known structure with some level of sequence identity to the target protein and then constructs a prediction for that protein.
  • Proteins@home — deduces DNA sequence, given a protein.
  • Rosetta@home — tests the assembly of specific proteins, using appropriate fragments of better-known proteins.
  • SIMAP — a database of protein similarities using distributed computing to detect sequence similarities.
  • TANPAKU — to predict protein structures from amino acid sequence.

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

• Physics and Astronomy
  • Einstein@Home — search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational wave detectors.
  • LHC@home — simulates particles travelling in the Large Hadron Collider.
  • SETI@home — Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The project will host:
    • Astropulse — searching for primordial black holes, pulsars, and ETI. Originally slated for a 2003 release, some Astropulse work units are only now being distributed. On January 31st 2007 a new beta of the application was released.
  • BRaTS@Home — to study gravitational lensing.

• Mathematics
  • ABC@Home — attempt to solve the ABC conjecture problem.
  • SZTAKI Desktop Grid — searches for generalized binary number systems.
  • TSP - "studies" the Traveling Salesman Problem. - despite the fact that an optimal solution is known and published http://elib.zib.de/pub/mp-testdata/tsp/tsplib/tsp/index.html

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.
  • PrimeGrid — searches for titanic primes.
  • Rectilinear Crossing Number — finds the lowest crossing number for a given array of points on a graph.
  • Riesel Sieve — attempts to solve the Riesel problem. (Beta)
  • 3x+1@home - studies the Collatz conjecture.
  • WEP-M+2 - investigates the factorization of Mersenne prime numbers.
  • Yoyo@home - finds optimal Golomb rulers using the OGR application from distributed.net.

• 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 the World Wide Web. (Closed Alpha)
  • Project Neuron — records, observes and analyzes BOINC activity and data with a view to developing metrics.
  • 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.

• Cryptography
  • HashClash@home — extends both theoretical and experimental results on collision generation for the MD5 and SHA1 hash functions. (Closed-Beta)
  • SHA-1 Collision Search - searches for a collision in the SHA1 hash function.

• Games
  • Chess960@Home — applies computational analysis to Chess960 in order to develop some basics of theory in this chess variant. (Alpha)
  • Project Sudoku - searches for the smallest possible start configuration of Sudoku.
  • Eternity2.net - searches for a solution to the Eternity II puzzle.

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

• Biology
  • Docking@Home — models protein-ligand docking. (Closed alpha)
  • Hydrogen@Home - searches for the most efficient method of producing biohydrogen.
  • The Lattice Project — studies a variety of problems in biology. (Alpha)
  • PS3GRID — Full-atom molecular biology simulations, specially optimized for the Cell microprocessor in PlayStation 3.
  • RALPH@home — Rosetta@home official alpha test project.
  • SciLINC — indexes a digitised library of plant species.
  • Superlink@Technion — uses genetic linkage analysis to identify genes that are responsible for genetic disorders.

• 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.
  • Milkyway@home — Research in the gravitational potential of the Milkyway galaxy using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) - Data Release 6
  • Orbit@home — monitoring the impact hazard posed by near-Earth objects.
  • SETI@home beta — is currently the test environment for SETI@home programs destined for public use. There is an ancillary SETI@home alpha — test environment for SETI@home beta code, workunits and science. SETI Alpha clients are used to test SETI@home Beta code. Currently Astropulse is in SETI Alpha testing.
  • PlanetQuest — find undiscovered celestial bodies within our galaxy (not open yet).

• Physics
  • Leiden Classical — General Classical Dynamics Grid for any scientist or science student.
  • LHC@home Alpha — LHC@Home official alpha test project. (Closed)
  • Nano-Hive@Home — simulates large-scale nanotech systems.
  • Pirates@home — currently being used to test BOINC's forum software for possible use by another project: Interactions in Understanding the Universe.
  • QMC@Home — study the structure and reactivity of molecules using Quantum Monte Carlo.
  • RND@home - calculates the most efficient arrangement of radio transmitters, treating it as an NP-hard optimization problem, and using the population-based incremental learning algorithm.
  • 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.

• Earth Sciences
  • APS@Home — examines the effects of atmospheric dispersion as it relates to the accuracy of measurements used in climate prediction.

Performance of BOINC projects:

• over 1,280,000 participants
• over 2,730,000 computers
• over 910 TeraFLOPS (more than supercomputer Blue Gene) [1]
• over 12 Petabytes of free disk space
• SETI@home: 3.4 million years of computing time (January 2008)

Distributed.net

Main article: Distributed.net

Distributed.net runs several projects:

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

Parabon Computation

Main article: Parabon Computation

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

• Compute Against Cancer — cancer research

World Community Grid

Main article: 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.

Active Projects

• Human Proteome Folding Project Phase II — predicting functions of proteins in conjunction with rosetta@home.
• FightAIDS@Home — tests potential drug molecule's ability to inhibit HIV protease.
• Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together — identify promising drug leads to combat the related dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and Yellow fever viruses.
• AfricanClimate@Home — develop more accurate climate models of specific regions in Africa.
• Help Conquer Cancer — improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography in order to increase understanding of cancer and its treatment.

Upcoming Projects

• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Phase II (Starting in 2008)

Completed Projects

• 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 [2] — analyzes tissue microarrays of breast, head, and neck cancers.
• Smallpox Research

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.

Active projects

• Mathematics
  • 15k Search [3] Automated search for large titanic prime numbers, of special forms.
  • Background Pi [4] Computes decimal digits of pi using digit extraction method.
  • 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 ?
  • 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 only at this time though.
  • The Riesel Sieve Project [6] — attempts to solve the Riesel problem by finding prime numbers. As of June 2007 they have found 28 primes and are attempting to find 73 more.
  • 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.
• 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. [9]
  • Cohesion Platform [10] 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 [11] — provides an advanced component platform for an effective invisible Grid.
  • GridECON [12] takes a user-oriented perspective and creates solutions to grid challenges to promote the wide-spread 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.[13]
  • JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
  • Legion — Grid computing platform developed at the University of Virginia. Available [14]
  • Majestic-12 — Uses a distributed web crawler program to index web sites for a distributed search engine.
  • NESSI-GRID [15] 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 [16] an EU-funded project which has been established to source key software components that can interoperate across several heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.
  • OMII-UK [17] provides free Open Source software and support to enable a sustained future for the UK e-Research community.
  • OurGrid [18] — 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.[19]
  • 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.
• Biology
  • Bio4All ToolKits - genetic annotation tools for responsible research
  • CommunityTSC [20] 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. (Uses Java VM)
  • Evolution@Home — addressing fundamental questions about evolution and population genetics.
  • Folding@home [21] — 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 [22].
  • SharkGrid — is a small grid for whale shark (Rhincdon typus) photo-identification.
• Chemistry
  • Chemomentum [23] 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. [24]
  • Muon1 [25] — Optimises the design of a particle collider which will be used to measure the mass of neutrinos.
  • Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet.
• Cryptography
  • freerainbowtables.com — generating perfect rainbow tables.
• Miscellaneous
  • BEinGRID — Business Experiments in Grid.
  • Gstock — Investment Strategy Search, dedicated to finding ever better technical analysis strategies.
  • MoneyBee [26] — 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; available here.
  • StrataGenie [27] — searches for trading strategies in intraday stock market data and distributes trading signals to subscribers.

Completed projects

• BBC Climate Change Experiment — (part of Climateprediction.net)
• DHEP [28] — 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.
• 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 Oxford University'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. [29]
• United Devices Cancer Research Project — find drugs for pancreatic cancer and leukemia. Closed on April 27, 2007.

Abandoned projects

These projects were either abandoned outright or in some cases merged with other larger ongoing 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[30].
• Popular Power
• Entropia
• Genome@home — due to lack of funding, merged with Folding@home.
• TivoCrack

Volunteer distributed computing projects

Popular projects in volunteer distributed computing include :

Project	Start	Affiliation	Area	Peak_#hosts	Current status
GIMPS	1994	?	mathematics	10,000	active
distributed.net	1997	U.S. non-profit organization	cryptography	100,000	active
SETI@home	1999	University of California, Berkeley	SETI	850,000	active
Electric Sheep	1999	?	art	57,000	active
Folding@home	2000	Stanford University	biology	200,000	active
Grid.org	2002	philanthropic by United Devices	biomedicine, other	3,734,000	closed
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	700,000	active
Einstein@home	2005	LIGO	astrophysics	200,000	active
Rosetta@home	2005	University of Washington	biology	100,000	active

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

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.
• Alchemi — A .NET-based system for building enterprise Grids and applications.
• 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.
• DragonFly BSD — an operating system aiming to support SSI clustering
• Enomalism — Virtualized Management Dashboard
• 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
• 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
• 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.

External links

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