| Distributed Computing Platforms |
| Platform | Current 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
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 June 6, 2014, the client is available for Windows (XP/Vista/7/8), Linux (2.4 kernel or higher), and Mac OSX (version 10.6 or later). |
Compute Against Cancer Compute Against Alzheimer's Disease
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"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." See clients for other platforms.--> See the BOINC download page for the latest version of the software client. An anonymous platform mechanism, which allows you to run BOINC on any platform, is available as of February 1, 2004. 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." Version 6.4 and later of the client uses NVIDIA GPUs (graphics cards) for processing if they are available. Starting with Windows version 7.2.28, VirtualBox open-source virtualization software is included with the BOINC client. This allows projects which require a certain operating system (like Linux) to run on Windows. 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 Artificial Intelligence System Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
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3x+1@home Artificial Intelligence System
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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. World Community Grid participants contributed 500 million results as of September 5, 2010. The platform's combined projects passed 1 million years of CPU time as of October 20, 2014. 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 Computing for Sustainable Water Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
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Computing for Clean Water
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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
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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. |
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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.
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KLive
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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. |
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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.
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MapRejuice is a JavaScript-based distributed computing platform which runs in web browsers when users visit web pages which include the MapRejuice code. The computing platform was created for Node Knockout by Team Anansi as a proof of concept. As of June 21, 2011, the computing platform is not in active use or development. The development team does not have time or resources to continue the project. They made the project's source code available for anyone who wants to continue or build on the project. |
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Zooniverse Codebase is a Github-based, open-source codebase created under the Apache 2.0 license. This codebase hosts code from several existing Zooniverse projects and can be used to enhance and contribute to those projects and to develop new Zooniverse projects. The codebase was created on February 18, 2013. See Zooniverse's publications page which lists all of the published results from Zooniverse projects. |
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| Past Distributed Computing Platforms | ||
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