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Distributed Computing Platforms

PlatformCurrent Project(s)Past Project(s)
Computing Platforms are software client applications that you can run on your computer and that host various, often unrelated, project applications. You can visit a computing platform website from this page, download the client and participate in the projects for that platform, or you can follow the platforms' project links to read more about them.
Parabon Computation Parabon Computation contributes to several areas of Life Sciences research with its Frontier Compute Engine computing platform.

Parabon's computing platform is a secure Java client. As of January 15, 2007, the client is available for Windows (NT/2000/XP), Linux (2.4 kernel or higher), and Mac OSX (version 10.2 or later).

Compute Against Cancer

 
boinc "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a platform for projects, like distributed.net and SETI@home, that use millions of volunteer computers as a parallel supercomputer." It provides tools create and manage distributed computing projects, to create project websites, to automate the translation of project websites, and tools for BOINC-based project participants to easily manage their multiple accounts. Source code is available for the platform, and interested C++ developers are encouraged to help develop the platform code. Information about BOINC is available in the following langauges (through links at the project website): Chinese, Estonian, Danish, French, German, Russian, Spanish.

BOINC is currently supported on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OSX platforms, and is ported to various other platforms by volunteers. CPU platform requirements may vary among project clients using BOINC. As of November 21, 2004, the core client has a cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) which allows the user to "suspend/resume projects and results, and project-specific web links. It uses a socket-based GUI RPC mechanism, which makes it possible to develop other GUIs, including ones that control many hosts."

Version 6.10.18 of the BOINC client is available for Windows as of November 9, 2009. Version 6.10.17 of the BOINC client is available for Linux as of October 28, 2009. Version 6.10.21 of the BOINC client is available for Mac OSX as of December 1, 2009. See clients for other platforms. An anonymous platform mechanism, which allows you to run BOINC on any platform, is available as of February 1, 2004. Version 6.4 and later of the client uses NVIDIA GPUs (graphics cards) for processing if they are available. Version 5.4 and later of the client allows BOINC users to "use account managers--special web sites that let you browse BOINC projects, attach/detach, change resource share and settings, all with point-and-click simplicity. Account managers are also great if you have several computers--you make changes on the web site, and they take effect on all of your computers."

See BOINC add-on software.

Platform participants: join one or more of the BOINC projects by registering for an account at a project site, then downloading and running the BOINC client. It will automatically set itself up to participate in that project. See more information about participating in BOINC projects.

Project owners: the project site has a lot of information about creating a BOINC project.

See unofficial stats for all active BOINC projects at BOINCstats.

See the unofficial BOINC Wiki.

Researchers published a paper, The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing (PDF), on December 12, 2006, about the limits of BOINC-based distributed computing projects

See scientific publications from BOINC-based projects.

"The First Pangalactic BOINC Workshop was held [July 11-12, 2005] at CERN, bringing together people from ClimatePrediction.net, Einstein@home, CERN, and BOINC. Slides and video of CPDN and E@h talks are available at http://cseminar.home.cern.ch/cseminar/ -> Past events."

Listen to a podcast by David Anderson on October 28, 2005, about BOINC and volunteer computing.

ABC@home

AfricanClimate@Home

AQUA@home

Artificial Intelligence System

BBC Climate Change Experiment

BRaTS

BURP

Cels@Home

Chess960@home

CHRONOS

The Clean Energy Project

climateprediction.net

Cosmology@Home

Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together

DepSpid

Docking@Home

DrugDiscovery@Home

Einstein@Home

Enigma@Home

FreeHAL@home

Genetic Life

GPUGRID

Help Conquer Cancer

Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Ibercivis

Influenza Antiviral Drug Search

The Lattice Project

Leiden Classical

LHC@home

Magnetism@home

malariacontrol.net

MilkyWay@home

MindModeling@Home

NFS@Home

NQueens

Nutritious Rice for the World

orbit@home

Pirates@Home

POEM@HOME

Predictor@home

PrimeGrid

PS3GRID

Project Neuron

proteins@home

QCN Alpha Test

QMC@home

RALPH@home

Ramsey@Home

Rectilinear Crossing Number

RenderFarm@Home

Reversi

Rosetta@home

RSA Lattice Siever (2.0)

SETI@home

SHA-1 Collision Search Graz

SIMAP

Spinhenge@home

Sudoku

SZTAKI Desktop Grid

TANPAKU

TSP

UCT : malariacontrol.net

μFluids@Home

Virtual Prairie

WEP-M+2 Project

XtremLab

yoyo@home OGR

yoyo@home EvoHo


Current status of active projects:

3x+1@home

APS@Home

BOLERO+

Elecle

HashClash

NanoHive@Home

PROSURFER

World Community Grid World Community Grid is a distributed computing platform which allows you to support multiple computing projects.

The World Community Grid is pursuing research projects to host on the grid. Research organizations with computing projects in need of free computing power are encouraged to submit a project proposal or to submit questions to the World Community Grid team via the Contact Us link on that page.

Platform participants: join one or more of the World Community Grid projects by registering for an account at the project site, then downloading and running the BOINC client software. (As of August 17, 2007, World Community Grid is migrating all of its projects to the BOINC platform.) Attach your BOINC client to the project URL www.worldcommunitygrid.org to run World Community Grid projects. You can select/de-select World Community Grid projects in your World Community Grid member page, under My Grid --> My Projects.

See global statistics for all World Community Grid projects.

See the 'I Dedicate' video, a montage created for World Community Grid from video dedications submitted by its participants in October, 2008.

Join a discussion forum about this platform.

AfricanClimate@Home

The Clean Energy Project

Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together

fightAIDS@home

Help Conquer Cancer

Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Human Proteome Folding

Influenza Antiviral Drug Search

Nutritious Rice for the World

Genome Comparison

Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy

Help Defeat Cancer

Smallpox

Darwin@Home Darwin@Home is a distributed computing platform which will sponsor and host distributed computing research projects to "create networked digital ecosystems" and "observe lifelike evolutionary processes in virtual or robotic space."

The Darwin@Home mailing list will be available soon. For now you can subscribe to the Biota.org mailing list to receive news about the platform and its projects. You can also download the Biota Live podcast.

Intelligent Design

 
OpenMacGrid OpenMacGrid is "a computing grid built up entirely of Macs, and open to Mac-using scientists everywhere.... Like the other grids, Mac users can donate their idle time to challenging scientific computations, but unlike the other networks, researchers are able to access this resource with their own scientific applications. The programs running on OpenMacGrid vary from day-to-day, reflecting the projects being undertaken by Mac researchers at that point in time. Mac users directly aid scientists in achieving important scientific breakthroughs."

Participants in OpenMacGrid can monitor the grid's activity by downloading the OpenMacGrid Dashboard widget from the platform website. The widget is based on the Xgrid@Stanford widget.

Join a discussion forum about the platform.

   
NEW!
CPUShare CPUShare is "connecting together the computers of the Internet in order to create a general purpose Low Cost and World Wide Supercomputer available to everybody to use in a matter of minutes, controlled by a market for the CPU resources that chooses the price of the CPU resources using the supply and demand law in real time." Participants in the projects running on the platform earn CPUCoins (virtual credit), which they can "spend" to run projects of their own on the platform, share with their friends, or possibly exchange for real money in the future. The platform uses an open source protocol which can be extended to any operating system and computing architecture. Currently it is being developed for x86, x86_64 and powerpc64 CPUs. The platform will host open source software applications. See a technical overview of the project.

See the project's wiki and blog.

KLive

CPUShare-Twisted

NEW!
Fedora Nightlife is "a new project for creating a Fedora (Linux) community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power."

Join a mailing list about the platform.

   
NEW!
Progress Through Processors Progress Through Processors is a Facebook application which allows Facebook users to contribute their spare computing power to some BOINC-based projects. The application was created by Intel and Grid Republic. This application is the first use of social networking for a collective research/computing effort. When the platform began in August, 2009, it supported Rosetta@home, climateprediction.net and Africa@home.
   
Past Distributed Computing Platforms


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