| Upcoming Distributed Computing Projects |
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The PhotonStar Project will be a
distributed human project to support
Optical SETI. Individuals
with a PC, an Internet connection, a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver,
and a telescope will be able to attach a laser detector to their telescope
and use their PC to join their telescope with thousands of others to create a
giant telescope. This giant telescope will be used to detect laser pulses
from a specific star system at a specific time.
See a paper about the project. | |
| A paper titled "Distributed Molecular Modeling over Very-Low-Bandwidth Computer Networks" proposes a molecular modeling or nanotechnology project designed that will work well over geographically-diverse computers and/or computers with low communication bandwidth. | |
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The Worldwide Lexicon (WWL)
project will use volunteer human translators to translate
words and phrases between languages, with an emphasis on uncommon language
pairs, and will use a Gnutella-like network of translation and dictionary
computers around the world to store the translations and make them freely
available to anyone. An HTTP interface to the translation network will provide
software developers a communication protocol with which to incorporate WWL
dictionary functionality into many different kinds of software applications
and web services. The project was be officially announced at the O'Reilly
& Associates emerging technologies conference in mid-May, 2002. The project's
creator published an excellent
overview article about it on May 10, 2002.
One of the first applications to be built from this project will be GNUTrans, a distributed translation service. The service will "crawl popular websites, news sources, etc., and divide texts into small blocks to be translated and revised by human volunteers" via Instant Messenger, using a lexicon@home client application. GNUTrans project hopes to begin a public beta test in December, 2002. | |
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The ISBN Database Project
will "create a multilingual database of books with well-defined remote access
protocols and free individual access." It should catalog books the way
MusicBrainz catalogs music. The
project is currently in development, but you can register to receive email
notification when the project website is officially launched.
The project has catalogued 6,691,941 books, 1,927,996 authors, and 465,861 publishers as of April 2, 2012. |
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GPU, "a
Giga@lobal Processing Unit," will be a framework for distributed computing
based on the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. The project hopes to use
the platform "to support peaceful, open and free research through
supercomputing. The CPU-time sharing system does not recognize privileges
between users. Each person agrees to provide network resources as needed and
in return is able to get CPU-cycles from other clients on the network
system." The platform client currently allows sharing of files and some
basic computations. Plug-ins will extend the capabilities of client nodes
and will be optimized for users' CPU-types.
The GPU client is a graphical application with windows for file sharing, computation, and other features. Windows version 0.916 of the client is available as of May 22, 2005. It includes a new Pastella open-source connection layer, DelphiPackageTool, and additional 2D statistics. Linux users are requested to download the Windows version and run it in Wine. |
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The Odd Perfect Number Search
will search for
odd perfect
numbers. The main goal of the project will be to "use community ECM
factorization or road block numbers" to increase the lower bound beyond the
10300 limit. The project will also have side goals such as
searching with limited components.
On March 2 the project cleared the road block at 10329. "An ECM server is already available at oddperfect.no-ip.com port 8201. This is a standard ECMNET server - if you need the client program it is available from ElevenSmooth." The project owner is currently developing some client applications which "will make it easy to search for odd perfect numbers in personal niches, to add factors that extend these personal searches, and to consolidate the new factors among a community." |
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PlanetQuest
is a BOINC-based
project which will look for planets around other stars. The project's
PQ Collaboratory software
application will analyze
telescope data to detect the presence of planets around stars and to
learn more about the stars. Project participants who discover planets will
be credited with the discovery in the project's planet catalog. The project
is currently in development and internal alpha testing. It hopes to begin
in Fall 2006. It published its latest newsletter on April 22, 2006.
The project will also teach participants about astronomy and related subjects, and will conduct optical SETI research (looking for alien or artificial light signals). Subscribe to a free monthly email newsletter to see how the project is progressing. |
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GP@home, Genetic
Programming at home, "is a new group/project dedicated to fully utilizing the
combined concepts of genetic programming and distributed computing to improve
the quality of life for all human beings. Nothing is impossible working
together." The project is creating a
BOINC-based software client.
The project website was last updated on June 29, 2007. |
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| EvoGrid "is a worldwide, cross-disciplinary effort to create an abstract, yet plausible simulation of the chemical origins of life on Earth. One could think of this as an artificial origin of life experiment. Our strategy is to employ a large number of computers in a grid to simulate a digital primordial soup along with a distributed set of computers acting as observers looking into that grid. These observers, modeled after the very successful @Home scientific computation projects, will be looking for signs of emergent complexity and reporting back to the central grid." The prototype EvoGrid should go live in 2010. | |
| Climate@Home will "help determine the accuracy of a computer model that scientists use to predict climate change." The project "will test the accuracy of a model developed by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and will serve as a trailblazer to explore the accuracy of other models as well." | |
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cpusage will allow computer owners to sell the power of their idle computers to the CPUsage CirrusGridTM for commercial customers to use for their computing needs. The grid will provide various services including web crawling, video encoding, life sciences, and application plugins. The project should begin in Spring, 2012. Computer owners are invited to sign up to be notified when the project begins. |
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