| Recently Completed Distributed Computing Projects |
| Many of the links on this page may no longer work. They are kept here for historical purposes. |
| Project Information | Category | Completion Date | Project Duration | Total Number of Participants / Computers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Help
Make Love Not Spam
attempted to force known spam websites out of business.
The project, run by Lycos Europe,
overloaded known spam sites with fake web page requests in an attempt to
maximize the spammers' bandwidth costs (without actually shutting them down).
It also encouraged visitors to recommend spam sites to attack. The project
ended after some of the sites it attacked reportedly redirected the attack
traffic back to the project site and almost shut it down, and after it
created a lot of controversy over the legality of the project's actions.
The project provided a Windows and Mac OSX screensaver client which sent fake requests to spam sites targeted by the project. The site also had a button which a visitor could press to send a fake request to one of the spam sites. |
Internet | December 5, 2004 | 2 weeks | unknown/unknown |
The Smallpox project, a collaboration among
grid.org, "Accelrys, Evotec OAI,
IBM, Oxford University, ... and numerous scientific researchers led by Dr.
Grant McFadden and Dr. Stewart Shuman," screened potential drug molecules to
help
find
a cure for Smallpox. Phase 1 of the project was completed on September
30, 2003: that phase screened "approximately 35 million molecules against a
series of protein targets related to Smallpox." Results from phase 1 were
submitted to the United States Department of Defense on Septemeber 30, 2003
(see news about
this). The project identified 44 strong treatment candidates, which were
given to the U.S. Department of Defense for further evaluation. "Based on
the success of the Smallpox study, World
Community Grid was created with the goal of creating a technical
environment where other humanitarian research could be processed."
Join a discussion forum about World Community Grid's projects. Join a discussion forum about grid.org's projects. |
Life Sciences | November 4, 2004 | 1 year, 9 months | unknown/unknown |
The Lucas Project
attempted "to complete the factorization tables with
Fibonacci
and Lucas numbers
which are maintained by Blair Kelly ... focusing only on composites of Lucas
numbers (composites are the remains left over when a number is successfully
divided by a prime number and the remaining is not prime)." The project hoped
to find all prime numbers that make up each Lucas number. It tried "to find
prime factors up to 55 digits, the ... upper limit of the GMP-ECM program."
The project appears to have been abandoned sometime in 2004. |
Mathematics | 2004 | at least 1 year | unknown/unknown |
The Distributed Folding
project simulated folding proteins to help scientists learn how proteins "fold
and assemble into living cells." The project, run by the
Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute,
the Hogue Bioinformatics
Laboratory and the
University of Toronto Department of Biochemistry, and supported by
Intel's
Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program,
tested a protein folding algorithm to see if it could reproduce natural
protein folds. The project hoped to create "the largest samples of protein
folds ever computed." In its first phase, 1a, it made 1 billion folds for five
small proteins. In phase 1b it made 10 billion folds for 10 large proteins.
Phase 2 began on June 17, 2003 and ended on October 5, 2004. The project
received a patent (U.S. Patent number 6490532) for its structure generation
algorithm on December 3, 2002. See the
results of the
proteins which were completed for the project.
Between May 30, 2002 and September 9, 2002, the project competed in the CASP5 structure prediction contest. Results of the competition were made available in late December, 2002. Between July 6, 2004 and August 31, 2004, the project competed in the CASP6 structure prediction contest. Results of the competition were not available as of October 5, 2004. After the project ended, the project team planned to analyze the results of the proteins it had folded with the current algorithm and to create a better folding algorithm for a possible future distributed computing project. View a Windows Media Player ASF-format file of a television interview by CityPulse24 of the project coordinators on November 27, 2002. The project software client ran as a screensaver on Win32 and as a text client on Win32, Linux, Sony PlayStation 2 Linux (it was the first distributed computing client to run on this platform), and many Unix platforms including Mac OS X. The project server and client software was also the first to use a ticketing system for submitting results: when the project server was too busy to receive all of the results clients attempted to submit to it, it would assign each client a numbered "ticket," the clients stored their results locally, and then each client could submit its results when the project server "called its ticket." See a discussion forum about this project. |
Life Sciences | October 5, 2004 | 2 years, 8 months | 32,976/unknown |
| The Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group (ASRG) ran a SETI project with the same basic goal as SETI@Home, to detect artificial radio signals from space. The project used a more manual process: users downloaded work units from a web page, processed them with one of three tools, and emailed results back to the project coordinator. More information about the project is/was available on a volunteer page. The project did not report any statistics or results on its website. | Science | unknown | unknown | unknown/unknown |
Clear Landmines
asked users to click a button to help clear
landmines around the world. Each click funded the clearing of at least
21 cm2 of land. The program was paid for by the companies which
sponsored the site. Money raised by the program was given to the
Canadian Landmine Foundation
to help fund the removal of landmines. The project generated over 2,400
clicks per day in its final year.
|
Charity | September, 2004 | 4 years | unknown/unknown |
MD5CRK
attempted to prove that the
MD5
encryption algorithm is insecure by finding a collision: two inputs which can
produce the same digest (encryption method). No one had ever found a
collision in the MD5 hash before the project began. Researchers in China
(not associated with MD5CRK) announced on August 17, 2004 that they
found a
collision (see their paper)
and proved that MD5 can be broken in a matter of hours. MD5CRK ended without
finding its own collision. It generated over 10 million of the estimated
5 billion points it needed to find a collision.
On August 23, 2004, the project made its database publicly available. "www.engsoc.org/~jlcooke holds GZipped images, rrd files, php and MySQL scripts for download. www.dp.cx/md5crk/explore.php contains a database browser and www.dp.cx/md5crk/database contains access to phpMyAdmin for custom queries. The Database contains all the reported work for over 170 days (trillions upon trillions of operations) of the project." MD5CRK was the first project to enable website owners to configure their web pages to link to a MD5CRK distributed Java applet. This feature allowed users to participate in the project just by viewing a web page. The applet had a button to allow a user to disable/enable the applet, so that the user could decide whether to allow it to run on his or her system. 174 websites participated in the project. The project also provided a standalone client. Join a discussion forum about this project. |
Cryptography | August 20, 2004 | 6 months | 1,803/unknown |
Click Fome
asked users to click a button to generate a financial
donation for foor and other reources to help people in need in Brazil. Thes
site was available in Portuguese and English. The donations were paid for by
the companies sponsoring the site. The project generated over 8.3 million
clicks.
|
Charity | June, 2004 | unknown | unknown/unknown |
|
The
Photon Soup 2 rendering
project produced a simulation of 382 billion photons in a room. This
simulation reproduced one which was done by the project coordinator, Richard
Keene, in 1994. The first simulation produced an
image for SIGGRAPH
94. That image took 100 SparcStation 1's a month to generate. The new
simulation was "much better, with a smaller aperature, in stereo, with 3
cameras, and with some errors fixed, and in Java." It also ran on machines
which were 3,000 times more powerful than those of 1994. The results of the
project were combined into one image, which will be published in an article
about the project. See Richard's April 13, 2004
Slashdot article about the project.
See the project's final images. |
Art | July 1, 2004 | 10 weeks | unknown/unknown |
| Help Crack DES had the same goals that the DES project did. The project looked for the remaining 35 bits of a 56-bit key, and it had to find them before a May 16, 2004 deadline. The project ended after searching 84.75% of the keyspace without finding the key. | Cryptography | May 18, 2004 | 4 weeks | 164/unknown |
Click the Planet
asked asked users to click buttons to save
2square meters of land per click for endangered forests and wildlife areas.
The site was only available in Italian.
The three projects listed on the main page were:
|
Charity | May, 2004 | unknown | unknown/unknown |
Users could click a button at
Aquaplastics 2004
"to help WaterAid deliver clean, safe water
and sanitation to people in Malawi and Madagascar." Users could also answer a
daily quiz question to earn an extra click. Each click donated €0.10.
The project hoped to reach 1.5 million clicks by June 22, 2004 to donate a
total of €150,000 to WaterAid. It reached its goal 6 weeks early. The
program cost the users nothing (it was paid for by the European plastics
industry).
|
Charity | May 5, 2004 | unknown | unknown/unknown |
| DES was a project by a group of students at Åbo Akademi University in Finland to support a Cryptograpy and Network Security course they were taking. They attempted a brute force search of the DES 56-bit keyspace within 1 month. This kind of encryption was cracked by distributed.net in a one-month contest in 1998. One week into the attempt, their professor gave them the first 8 bits of the key to help them narrow the keyspace so that they would have a chance of finishing the project by the deadline. The winning key, 8a2898441652308a, was found after 383 computers searched 63% of the narrowed keyspace in 3 weeks. | Cryptography | May 5, 2004 | 3 weeks | 262/383 |
DALiWorld
(DALi stands for Distributed Artificial Life) wasn't
technically a distributed computing project since it wasn't solving a problem.
It was just a fun toy: a distributed virtual aquarium.
Written in Java by DALi, Inc., it created
a virtual saltwater aquarium in a desktop window or in a screensaver and
populated it with fish (which didn't do much more than swim around).
When the user was connected to the Internet, some of his or her fish
occasionally migrated to other users' aquariums and some of their fish
migrated to the user's aquarium (he could turn this feature off if he wanted
to). The user could click his right mouse button on each fish to see its
passport, which showed who created it and where it had been.
|
Miscellaneous | April, 2004 | 2 1/2 years | unknown/unknown |
ECC2-109,
was a distributed effort to solve
Certicom's
ECC2-109
challenge. The challenge offered a $10,000 (US) prize. The project
calculated 41 million distinguished points using the parallelized rho method
"in conjunction with (1) The `distinguished points' technique of Paul Van
Oorschot and Mike Wiener, and (2) The ideas in the paper of Edlyn Teske for
getting walks more closely approximating a random walk" before it found a
collision of two points, which enabled it to find the solution:
$k = \log_P Q$ is given by either of the following:
Join a discussion forum about this project. ecc2.com, which hosted the discussion forum, also hosted the project stats. |
Cryptography | April 14, 2004 | 17 months | 2,600/unknown |
The Collatz Conjecture project attempted to verify the
Collatz
Conjecture for larger values. This was a test project for the
Grid on Tap computing
platform.
Collatz Phase 1 tested n from 1 to 99,999,999,999. It began on August 22, 2003, and ended on September 3, 2003. Collatz Phase 2 tested n from 100,000,000,000-350,010,009,999. It began on September 2, 2003 and ended on September 10, 2003. Collatz Phase 3 tested n from 350,010,009,999-850,060,009,999. It began on September 10, 2003. Collatz Phase 4 tested n from 850,060,009,999-1,850,160,009,999. Collatz Phase 5 tested n from 1,850,160,009,999-11,851,160,009,999. Collatz Phase 6 tested n from 11,851,160,009,999-21,852,160,009,999. Collatz Phase 7 tested n from 21,852,160,009,999-71,857,160,010,000. Collatz Phase 8 tested n from 71,857,160,010,000-121,862,160,010,001. The project ended before it completed Collatz Phase 9. |
Mathematics | January, 2004 | 5 months | unknown/unknown |
| "Search of the next prime of the form n!+1" used the Windows primeform client to search for primes of the form n! + 1 and n! - 1. | Mathematics | 2004 | at least 4 years | unknown/unknown |
Genome@home, a
sister project of Folding@home
designed new proteins and genes to learn better
how natural genomes have evolved and how natural genes and proteins work.
It was the first large-scale public distributed computing project to study
protein folding.
Genome@home's first experiment concluded successfully in early March, 2001, with more than 1000 users creating more than 15,000 new genes for 217 proteins. On November 12, 2001, Genome@home began Phase 2 of its protein design experiments. This phase studied "all single-chain proteins in the RCSB Protein Data Bank" with a length up to 150 amino acids--over 3,015 different proteins. As of April, 2003, the project had "used almost 20,000 donated CPU-years to calculate over 6 million new protein sequences." The work done with the version 0.99 client, consisting of nine stages, resulted in 4 major scientific publications. On May 1, 2002, Genome@Home began a new series of RMSD (root-mean-square deviation) projects to study the structural diversity of "ensembles of protein backbones" used in the design of large proteins. The following paper was published from the results of this project:
See a FAQ about the end of the project and how the project results will be used. |
Life Sciences | March, 2004 | 4 years | unknown/unknown |
CycleTraders combined
distributed computing with Peer-to-Peer computing concepts. A user could use
the client to measure the response time of other users' websites while they
measured the response time of his/her site.
|
Internet | unknown | unknown | unknown/unknown |
 RSAttack576,
was a distributed effort to solve the
RSA 576-bit challenge. The project ended after the RSA 576-bit challenge
was factored
on December 5, 2003, by some people not related to this project. The project
processed over 26,468,196 packets (over 7.9404588+14 keys).
Join a discussion forum (in French) about this project. |
Cryptography | December, 2003 | unknown | unknown/unknown |
Click for Cans (TM) asked
volunteers to click on their favorite American football (gridiron) team's helmet
on the project website to donate a can of
Campbell's Chunky soup to a "variety of
hunger relief charities across the [United States]." The project reached its
goal of donating 5,000,000 cans.
|
Charity | January 4, 2003 | 2 months | unknown/unknown |
| Genetic TSP used a Java application that ran through a user's web browser and used genetic algorithms to solve a Traveling Salesman Problem (in a TSP, a salesman must find the shortest route in which he/she can visit each a set of cities once and return to his/her starting city). This project attempted to solve a problem of 15,122 cities of Germany. As of December, 2003, the current record-holders of this problem were Princeton University and Rice University. | Puzzles/Games | December, 2003 | 2 years | unknown/unknown |
GRISK searched
for K-optimal
lattice rules. It completed a Delta=7 project on November 15, 2000, and
a Delta=8 project on December 21, 2001. It began a Delta=11 project on
December 21, 2001, and completed 22% of it when the GRISK project ended.
|
Mathematics | October, 2003 | at least 3 years | 604/unknown |
The Distributed Emirp Project
searched for Emirps, prime numbers whose digits, when
reversed, are also a prime number (for example, 13 and 31 are Emirps). The
project processed 197 blocks.
Join a discussion forum about the project. |
Mathematics | August, 2003 | 2 months | 65/unknown |
MD@home
studied the properties of oligopeptides. Note that
the site is written in Russian, but
babelfish provides a reasonable
English translation  of it. The project simulated the thermal agitation of
molecules within large proteins in order to understand how the design of
a protein defines the protein's properties and behavior (and the properties
and behaviors of the protein's component parts (oligopeptides). The
client software simulated the thermal agitation of a molecule and calculated
the special characteristics of that thermal agitation. The project processed
32,000 work units.
|
Life Sciences | August, 2003 | 9 months | 1,470/unknown |
The NEO Project used the NEO-c (Network Exchange
Operation for Charity) platform to participate in various computing
challenges and projects, and would have donated any winnings to the charities
specified by its users. The project was the first to use Microsoft's .NET
architecture. The project ended unexpectedly before any results were found
for the challenges below:
The project's first challenge was the RSA 576-bit factoring challenge. The project's first attemp to solve the challenge was through random guesses. For this attemp, volunteers generated 39,033,522 packets (.154885015296E+15 keys checked) for the project. The attempt ended on January 10, 2003. The project's second attempt, Phase 2, would have used a General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) algorithm. The second challenge was the MD5 project. The MD5 encryption algorithm is widely used in business, secure websites, Unix systems, and the Internet. The challenge would have demonstrated MD5's vulnerability, forcing people who use it to develop a better algorithm. This project began on January 30, 2003, and was stopped on May 20, 2003, due to a lack of interest from the MD5 developers (who were outside of the NEO project). The challenge tested at least 0.53% of the MD5 keyspace. The third challenge was the Tellurium project, a physics project in which space-time geometry, specifically Isaac Newton's Equivalence Principle (see a simpler explanation), would be tested with the handedness or chirality property of matter. The principle has never been tested this way: if the test had caused it to fail, then Albert Einstein's General Relativity theory would be shown to be subtly incorrect. This challenge began on May 9, 2003, but the alpha client for the challenge was never publicly released. The fourth challenge was World TSP, a study of the Traveling Salesman Problem. This challenge attempted to find the shortest route which visits all 1,904,711 populated cities and towns on Earth. "The current best lower bound on the length of a tour for the World TSP [was] 7,510,666,782 (Kilometers)." This bound was established on June 18, 2002. The challenge used an evolving artificial intelligence algorithm to attempt to beat that bound. With 97,820 total routes completed, the shortest route discovered was 13,802,932,609 Kilometers. |
Cryptography, Science | July 31, 2003 | 10 months | ~50,000/~50,000 |
Operation Project X was a distributed effort to solve the
Xbox Linux Project, a challenge to crack the
2048-bit RSA private encryption key Microsoft uses to sign Xbox media. If
this key was discovered, Linux could be run on the Xbox without modifying
the Xbox hardware. The client used Microsoft's .NET architecture, and was
available for many platforms, including Xbox. Over 351.3 trillion keys
were tested, but the project ended unexpectedly before the key was found.
Source code for the project is available here and here for anyone who would like to continue the project. Listen to an April 26, 2003 CBC Radio interview (in RealAudio format) with some of the project coordinators. |
Cryptography | July 31, 2003 | 4 months | ~4,000/unknown |
| The search for Wieferich prime numbers looked for numbers of the form ap-1 = 1 (mod p2) for a = 2 or 3. The only two known Wieferich primes are 1,093 and 3,511 and there are no other Wieferich primes less than 2 * 1014. The project extended the search limit to 1.25 * 1015, but did not find any new Wieferich primes. 131,429 total ranges (37,424,648,092,395 primes) were checked at an average speed of 621,457 primes per second. 131 near-misses were found. | Mathematics | June 19, 2003 | 14 months | 304/unknown |
The DIstributed Chess Project
tried to create better chess-playing artificial neural
networks. The project software implemented a genetic algorithm "to train
multi-layer-perceptron neural networks on sets of chess positions with known
best continuations (e.g. endgame studies, mate in n moves, white
to move and win, ...)." The software was available as a screensaver or
command-line client. It allowed the user to "view the status of the evolution
any time in terms of computation time, current generation, current best
fitness and population diversity" and to "modify the key parameters of the
algorithm before a new task starts (e.g. number of generations, population
size, number of hidden layers, number of nodes per hidden layer, ...)" if the
user wanted to take an active role in shaping its chess-playing neural networks.
Volunteers contributed 16 years 57 days of computing time to the project.
|
Puzzles/Games | April, 2003 | 10 months | 658/unknown |
The sub-projects:
|
Life Sciences | April 30, 2003 | 4 months | unknown/12,000 |
The Triangles project found difference triangles with
the smallest (optimal) span for a given sequence. The project didn't have
a website. The project evolved from a
programming contest, sponsored by Al Zimmerman, which ran from July, 2002
to October 15, 2002. See the
final results of the contest. The project used a modified version of
Jean-Charles Meyrignac's client for the
Minimal Equal Sums of Like Powers
project and a modified version of Stephen Montgomery-Smith's
Dispense Package distributed
computing platform.
567,847 entries were submitted for the project. See the smallest known spans discovered by the project. Join a discussion group about the project. |
Mathematics | March 7, 2003 | 4 months | 44/unknown |
Project Dolphin
tracked the total number of keystrokes users made
during the use of their computers. It was just for fun. It tracked a
total of 34,935,065,880 from over 36,000 users (1,000 times more users
than the project coordinator originally planned for).
| Human | January 17, 2003 | 1 year | 36,000/not applicable |
|
DClient
was a distributed, brute-force attempt to find the secret "backdoor"
password for Tivo's version 3.2
software. This password would allow a Tivo device owner to enable hidden
features in the software. The project ended before a key was found.
You can read the project
post-mortem, download the
server source
code or the last version of the
client application
or see the final
stats page. The project generated about 2.7 billion blocks of keys using
about 85 CPU years.
Version 1 of this project was known as Tivocrack. 320,679 packets were completed for Tivocrack. Tivocrack began from a discussion forum. Version 2 became active around November 8, 2002. |
Cryptography | January 20, 2003 | 3 months | unknown/unknown |
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