List of volunteer computing projects

This is a list of distributed computing projects. In many of these projects, users volunteer CPU time from their home computer. When there is idle time available to work on the distributed computing project, client software can detect and utilize the "spare CPU cycles." In some projects, a computer's graphics processor (GPU) may be employed to work on the project.

Current Projects

• Biology and medicine
  • Folding@Home - seeks to cure Cancer, ALS, Alzheimer's and many other diseases by observing proteins folding. Currently the fastest computer in the world at 8 petaFLOPS.
  • Docking@Home — models protein-ligand docking.
  • GPUGRID.net — conducts full-atom molecular biology simulations, designed for CUDA-capable graphics processing units.
  • Malaria Control — performs stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of malaria.
  • POEM@Home — models protein folding using Anfinsen's dogma.
  • Rosetta@home — tests the assembly of specific proteins, using appropriate fragments of better-known proteins.
  • SIMAP — compiles a database of protein similarities.

• Earth sciences
  • Climateprediction.net — attempts to reduce the uncertainty ranges of climate models.
  • Quake-Catcher Network — uses accelerometers in, or attached to, internet-connected computers to detect earthquakes.

• Physics and astronomy
  • AQUA@home — uses Quantum Monte Carlo to predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers.
  • Einstein@Home — uses data from LIGO and GEO 600 to search for gravitational waves.
  • MilkyWay@Home — uses data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to deduce the structure of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • QMC@Home — uses Quantum Monte Carlo to predict molecular geometry.
  • SETI@home — searches cosmic radio emission data for extraterrestrial intelligence.
  • theSkyNet — searches data collected from radio telescopes such as ASKAP.

• Mathematics
  • PrimeGrid — searches for various types of prime numbers
  • Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search - searches for Mersenne primes

• Multi-application projects
  • Ibercivis — studies nuclear fusion, materials science, neurodegenerative diseases caused by amyloid accumulation, the effect of light on nanomaterials, fluid mechanics, macromolecular docking, and the function of proteins in memory and learning.
  • World Community Grid — studies a variety of problems in biology, medicine and the environment.
    • Clean Energy Project — tries to find the best organic compounds for solar cells and energy storage devices.On phase 2.
    • Computing for Clean Water — uses the techniques of molecular dynamics to determine the fluid dynamics of water filters that are composed of nanotubes.
    • FightAIDS@Home — identifies candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.
    • Help Conquer Cancer — improves the results of protein X-ray crystallography to increase understanding of cancer and its treatment.
    • Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy — investigates protein-protein interactions for more than 2,200 proteins which structures are known, focusing on those that act in neuromuscular diseases. Currently on Phase 2.
    • Help Fight Childhood Cancer — finds drugs that can disable three proteins associated with neuroblastoma.Scientists haven't given any details but appear to very optimistic on the current results.More targets will be tested.
    • Human Proteome Folding Project — studies proteome folding in conjunction with Rosetta@home.Currently on Phase 2.
    • Influenza Antiviral Drug Search — finds drugs that can stop the spread of influenza strains that have become drug resistant as well as new strains.Phase 2 will start soon.
    • Nutritious Rice for the World — tries to predict the protein structure of rice to help rice breeders create more abundant, resilient and nutritious harvests. Completed

Projects in development

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

• Art
  • BURP — developing a publicly distributed system to render 3D animations. (Beta)

• Artificial Intelligence
  • distributedDataMining — tests the data mining abilities of various methods of data analysis and machine learning. (Alpha)
  • Evo@home — uses evolutionary algorithms to optimize the parameters of different kinds of machine learning algorithms. (Alpha)
  • FreeHAL@home — parses and converts big open source semantic nets to use in FreeHAL. (Alpha)
  • MindModeling@Home — builds cognitive models of the human mind. (Beta)

• Biology & Medicine
  • DrugDiscovery@Home — early drug discovery by in silico drug design of chemical compounds for medicines in the fields of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. (Alpha)
  • The Lattice Project — studies a variety of problems in biology. (Beta)
  • RALPH@home — Rosetta@home official alpha test project.
  • RNA World — uses bioinformatics software to study RNA structure. (Beta)
  • Superlink@Technion — uses genetic linkage analysis to identify genes responsible for genetic disorders. (Beta)

• Cryptanalysis
  • AndrOINC — tries to break a 1024 bit RSA key used to sign the boot and recovery partitions on the Motorola Milestone phone. (Alpha)
  • Moo! Wrapper - combines BOINC with distributed.net, which is trying to break the RC5 cipher. (Beta)
  • Enigma@Home — tries to break several Enigma messages believed to be heretofore unbroken.

• Games
  • Chess960@Home — studies Chess960 to develop some basics of theory in this chess variant. (Alpha)
  • Sudoku@vtaiwan — tries to determine whether unique-solution sudoku puzzles with only 16 clues exist. (Alpha)

• Internet
  • WUProp@Home — collects publicly-available statistics about other BOINC projects. (Alpha)

• Mathematics
  • Collatz Conjecture — studies the Collatz conjecture. (Beta)
  • Goldbach's Conjecture — tests Goldbach's weak conjecture. (Alpha)
  • Mersenne@home — searches for Mersenne primes. (Alpha)
  • NFS@Home — performs the lattice sieving step in the general number field sieve factoring of large integers. (Alpha)
  • primaboinca — searches for counterexamples to various conjectures involving prime numbers. (Alpha)
  • RSA Lattice Siever — contains several factorization subprojects. (Alpha)
  • SZTAKI Desktop Grid — searches for generalized binary number systems. (Alpha)
  • WEP-M+2 — investigates the factorization of Mersenne prime numbers. (Beta)

• Physics and astronomy
  • Constellation — researches various aerospace-related science and engineering problems. (Alpha)
  • Cosmology@Home — searches for the model that best describes our universe and finds the range of physical cosmology models that agree with available data. (Beta)
  • eOn — uses theoretical chemistry techniques to study condensed matter physics and materials science. (Alpha)
  • Hydrogen@Home — searches for the most efficient method of hydrogen production. (Alpha)
  • Leiden Classical — general classical mechanics grid for any scientist or science student. (Beta)
  • LHC@home — simulate high-energy collisions of protons in the Large Hadron Collider
  • Magnetism@home — explores magnetization patterns in nanotechnology. (Alpha)
  • Orbit@home — monitoring the impact hazard posed by near-Earth objects. (Alpha)
  • Pirates@home — currently being used to test BOINC's forum software for possible use by another project: Interactions in Understanding the Universe.(Alpha)
  • SLinCA@Home — studies scaling laws in cluster aggregation, an aspect of materials science. (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. (Alpha)

• Unspecialized projects
  • CAS@home — a volunteer computing project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Alpha)
  • EDGeS@Home — first subproject models the behavior of plasma in fusion power devices. (Beta)
  • Second Computing — assesses biopolymer dynamics, and models the behavior of clonal colonies in a prairie ecosystem. (Alpha)
  • Yoyo@home — calculates optimal Golomb rulers using the OGR application from distributed.net, optimizes the design of the Neutrino Factory, calculates the Lenstra elliptic curve factorization, and analyzes mitochondrial DNA.

Other distributed computing projects

• Art
  • Electric Sheep — an open source screen-saver to animate and evolve abstract animations.

• Chemistry
  • Chemomentum — undertakes the evaluation and risk assessment of chemicals.

• Cryptanalysis
  • distributed.net - tries to break the RC5 cipher.
  • M4 Project — decrypts Enigma messages from World War II.

• Digital currency
  • Bitcoin — a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency.
  • Namecoin — a peer-to-peer network based anonymous digital currency. The added ability to support a decentralised domain name system currently as a .bit.

• Engineering
  • BREIN — uses the Semantic Web and multi-agent systems to build simple and reliable grid systems for business, with a focus on engineering and logistics management.

• Internet
  • A-Ware — is developing a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology to give easy access to grid resources.[1]
  • Amagit.COM — employs a distributed web crawling platform to build a search index.[2]
  • AssessGrid — addresses obstacles to wide adoption of grid technologies by bringing risk management and assessment to this field, enabling use of grid computing in business and society.[3]
  • Cohesion Platform — a Java-based modular peer-to-peer multi-application desktop grid computing platform for irregularly structured problems developed at the University of Tübingen (Germany).[4]
  • D4Science — establishes networking, grid-based, and data-centric e-Infrastructures that accelerate multidisciplinary research by overcoming barriers related to heterogeneity, sustainability and scalability.
  • DIMES — maps the structure and evolution of the Internet infrastructure, letting users see how the Internet looks from their home.
  • Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) — a series of projects funded by the European Commission; links over 70 institutions in 27 European countries to form a multi-science computing grid infrastructure for the European Research Area, letting researchers share computer resources.
  • GridCOMP — provides an advanced component platform for an effective invisible grid.[5]
  • GridECON — takes a user-oriented perspective and creates solutions to grid challenges to promote widespread use of grids.[6]
  • Hours 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.
  • Java Heterogeneous Distributed Computing (JHDC) — an open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
  • Legion — a 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.[7]
  • NESSI-GRID [8] — aims to provide a unified view for European research in service 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.
  • neuGRID — develops a new user-friendly grid-based research e-infrastructure enabling the European neuroscience community to perform research needed for the pressing study of degenerative brain diseases, for example, Alzheimer's disease.
  • OMII-Europe — an EU-funded project 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, it uses a different trade-off compared to most grid projects: it forfeits supporting arbitrary applications in favor of supporting only Bag-of-Tasks applications.
  • RESERVOIR — aims to increase the competitiveness of EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure to support the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service.
  • ScottNet NCG — 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 functions.

• Mapping
  • TilesAtHome (t@h) — renders osmarender maps from OpenStreetMap data. The osmarender, maplint and captionless layers are made in this way.

• Mathematics
  • Background Pi — computes decimal digits of pi using digit extraction method.
  • distributed.net - finds optimal Golomb rulers.
  • Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) — is dedicated to finding ever larger Mersenne primes.
  • NFSNET — uses the general number field sieve to factor increasingly large integers.
  • Pi Segment — a Chinese volunteer computing project to look for specific digits (in binary) of Pi and make volunteer computing more popular in China. The project was completed in 2007 and announced the 2,000,000,000,000,000th bit of Pi is 0.
  • 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.
  • Twin Prime Search — searches for large twin primes
  • Wieferich@Home — searches for new Wieferich primes

• Physics/Astronomy
  • Galaxy Zoo — classifies galaxy types from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Part of the Zooniverse group of citizen science projects.
  • Stardust@home — scans/analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet.
  • Muon1 DPAD — genetic-based method to design + optimise a particle accelerator for use in the Neutrino Factory

• Miscellaneous
  • The CCL Game and The CCL Winter Game Optimal Solution Finder — uses brute-force search to find optimal solutions for a Flash clone of The Incredible Machine.
  • BEinGRID Business Experiments in Grid — also see IT-tude.com
  • Gstock Investment Strategy Search — is dedicated to finding ever better technical analysis strategies.
  • MoneyBee — generates stock forecasts by applying 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 64-bit encryption, which is now being brute-force searched, using a distributed computing client created by one player.
  • SoundExpert — 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.[9]
  • 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.
  • StrataGenie — searches for trading strategies in intraday stock market data and distributes trading signals to subscribers.[10]

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 Ended. Replaced by XSEDE Project [11]
• VirginiaTech

External links

• DistributedComputing.info — lists ongoing, future and past projects
• Flash tutorials - how to attach BOINC projects Template:En icon Template:Cs icon
• How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity
• Volunteer@Home.com — all about volunteer computing