| Project Logo | Project Information | Project % Complete | Major Supported Platforms | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science | |||||
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Search for extra-terrestrial radio signals at SETI@home. Version 3.03 of the client is available as of
December 13, 2000. Check the status of the SETI@home data server and tapes. View derived statistics for SETI@home. Read a short research paper, written in 1998, about the origins of SETI and SETI@home.
See my SETI@home stats. |
ongoing (268,430,652 total work units processed) |
   
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| Help the Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group (ASRG) in their SETI project. Their system has the same basic goal as SETI@Home, but it uses a more manual process: you download work units from a web page, process them with one of three tools, and email results back to the project coordinator. More information can be found on the volunteer page. | ongoing |
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Participate in various volunteer science- and medical-oriented research projects at Entropia. Sign up to receive information about how to download the client.
The member site contains stats about all of the current projects, and other information. |
multiple projects ongoing |
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Help design safer storage vessels for nuclear waste or participate in other
upcoming distributed projects at ProcessTree Volunteers (formerly known as DCypher.net).
ProcessTree Volunteers has restarted its weekly $100 giveaway for participants as of October 9, 2000. See my ProcessTree Volunteers overall stats.
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Gamma Flux: unknown (57,935,848 total work units processed) |
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Design and evolve robotic lifeforms via a screensaver application in
The GOLEM@Home
Project. The screensaver randomly creates a population of virtual robots
on your system and then evolves them (the current rule for evolution is
survival of the robots who can move the greatest distance over an infinite
plain). Every week or so a few of your robots will move to someone else's
Golem screensaver and a few of someone else's robots will move to your
screensaver (you can disable this feature if you're worried about security).
These virtual robots contain design information that can be used to build
actual working robots.
Version 2.44 is available as of October 11, 2000. New features:
Join a mailing list about GOLEM@Home. |
ongoing |
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Participate in health, science, and Internet-related research projects at
United Devices. Participants are entered
in sweepstakes drawings for prizes.
United Devices' first project is a bioinformatics research project for the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri. The project, called HMMER, uses the Hidden Markov Modeling technique to compare known DNA sequences (amino acids) against the data from the Human Genome Project to find similar sequences. United Devices' second project will search for cancer-fighting drugs in partnership with the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, England. This project will begin early in 2001. A note on the statistics pages: your total contribution to the project is shown in the CPU time you have contributed. The statistic for Current Entries does not reflect the number of results that your computer has found, but instead the total number of sweepstakes entries you have been given for the current drawing, with a maximum of 1500 per member. This number can adjust up or down according to a number of factors and according to your contribution compared to the contributions of other members. The FAQ will soon contain more information about this. |
ongoing |
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Join XPulsar@Home, a Monte-Carlo Java
applet simulation run by the Astrophysics department at the
University of Tuebingen in Germany to model the spreading of X-ray
photons in X-ray pulsars.
The site is in German, but you can use a free machine translator to see reasonable translations of the site's pages. The client is a Java applet or application. It finishes a work unit (photon packet) in 2 to 3 minutes, so it's best suited for users with full-time Internet connections, but modem users can also contribute useful work. Users behind firewalls are supported because the applet works through your web browser. If you would like to try the applet, click on the registrieren
button to register a user ID. On the next page, enter the user name you
would like in the Benutzername: field, and your email address in the
Email: field. The next section is for joining a group. Use and
interpret at your own risk :-) Click the Abschicken button at the
bottom of the page to complete the registration. On the next page you
will see links for normales Java-Applet and abgespeckets
Java-Applet. The first one is the graphics version of the applet and the
second one is the text-only version. Click on the link you want and the
applet will download and run itself. You don't need to do anything else.
To start the applet again at another time, just click on the Applet link on
the left of any page, and you will see the links for the applets again.
Click on one of those links to download and start the applet. Translations
(according to babelfish.altavista.com) of the words on the text-only
applet: You can see real-time stats and rankings under the Statistik
menu on the left side of every page. Benutzer mean user and
Gruppen means groups: you can probably figure out what each stats
link means from those words. Translations of some of the table column
headers on the stats pages: |
ongoing (195,689,328,594 total photons computed) |
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| Medical/Health | |||||
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Help find a more effective influenza vaccine at Popular Power.
This site will eventually have for-pay projects too, and the client will have the added bonus of not requiring the user to reinstall it every time a new project comes out. It uses Java for task implementation, so it can provide a secure "sandbox" area within which customers can run their own code without being able to acces the rest of your system (the way a browser provides a secure area for a Java applet).
It will be the first commercial project that can run code modules written independently by customers. Note: the Worker client is still in development (the current version is 0.3.2). It does not support modem users well, but it will eventually: it does support users behind proxy servers. The new client has web-based user account management, uses JDK 1.3, has support for Red Hat Linux 7.0, and some major bug fixes. The client allows you to view your statistics in a web page, and it provides multi-processor support for Linux users. Background of the influenza vaccine modeling project. Join a mailing list about Popular Power and the Worker client. See the The unofficial Stats Page created by John Blue. (You can add your node ID to the stats page here.) See my Popular Power stats. |
ongoing |
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Parabon Computation has research projects
(and will have commercial projects) and has a secure Java client like Popular
Power's. A
version 1.3.8
upgrade to its Win9X/NT client is available as of December 20, 2000. You
can register for an
account or sign up to
receive email notification when the Linux, Mac and Unix clients are available.
The client currently participates in one or more of the following projects: an exhaustive regression analysis to identify the specific factors that ease the suffering of chemotherapy recipients, and a gene expression analysis and a study of the molecular dynamics of protein folding to create greater understanding of the behavior of cancer cells and how they interact with potential new treatments. Parabon has a sweepstakes for active participants. You can qualify to win $100 every day your Pioneer client connects to the Parabon servers, and one participant a month wins $1000. |
ongoing |
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Folderol is a volunteer project that
uses a screensaver to simulate protein folding of the data from the
Human Genome Project.
Version 0.57 is available as of October 7, 2000. |
ongoing; 7000 simulations of Target 114 completed. |
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Folding@home
is another volunteer project that uses a screensaver or client application
based on the Mithral
CS-SDK
to simulate protein folding in an effort to better understand how proteins
self-assemble or fold.
Version 1.2 of the graphical screensaver and the text-only client application are available as of November 1, 2000. Currently only the client application has support for users behind firewalls. Version 1.2 for Linux is in Beta testing as of November 27, 2000 and will be in general release very soon. A Solaris client will also be available soon. |
ongoing |
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Help design new drugs to fight AIDS at fightAIDS@home using the entropia client. | ongoing: 180,799 tasks done |
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| Cryptography | |||||
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distributed.net organizes projects
like cracking data encryption
schemes (legally) and searching
for Optimal Golomb Rulers (measuring systems used in radio astronomy and
X-ray crystallography). Version 2.8012.465 of the client is available for most major platforms as of January 9, 2001.
See my RC5-64 stats, my OGR-24 stats, and my OGR-25 stats. |
RC5-64: 38.6% in 1,176 days OGR-24: unknown (133,889,121 Gnodes checked in 182 days) OGR-25: unknown (2,007,450,461 Gnodes checked in 162 days) 1 Gnode = 1 billion nodes |
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| Internet | |||||
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Evaluate the performance of large websites to find bottlenecks with
Porivo Technologies' distributed client,
Porivo PEER and its first
project, peerReview. (And
collect sweepstakes entries and possibly win US$4000 in gift certificates at Buy.com.)
Note: peerReview does its work when a network connection is present. Modem users will notice that the client is not active while they are offline. A work unit can be completed in 15-20 minutes, so it is possible for modem users to contribute useful work. Also, the client currently doesn't support users behind firewalls. Porivo is developing future projects to research science, engineering, and Internet research-related problems. Some future projects will be more CPU-intensive, allowing modem users to work offline. As of November 6, 2000, version 1.2 of the PEER client is now available for Windows, Solaris and Linux. The client has a new interactive interface and features that improve PEER's performance. Current Windows PEER users' clients will update automatically. Solaris and Linux users can download the software by going to the user login page and selecting "Download the Porivo PEER." |
ongoing (1,458,390 total credits) |
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Help build a better P2P web searcher by joining research with the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Lehigh University to
develop an approach called Hierarchical Distributed Dynamic Indexing (HDDI
TM), at DataSynapse.
You will get paid in Flooz bucks for every hour your computer is online,
processing data.
Note: DataSynapse is designed only for users with broadband Internet connections and is only available for the Windows platform currently. |
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Get paid to put your spare CPU cycles to use in the ProcessTree Network.
ProcessTree's first paid project begins this week (the week of January 8, 2001). Selected users in certain locations with a Win32 platform and a 128 Kbit/sec or faster, permanent Internet connection can join the project. The payout will be $12.50 per month and location (that amount will be divided among the systems active in each location during the month). |
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| Mathematics | |||||
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The current largest known Mersenne prime number is 26972593 - 1 (found on June 1, 1999, and containing 2,098,960 digits). Help find the next one at the PrimeNet server. Unix users can participate in GIMPS using precompiled clients or source code at Ernst Mayer's site and the manual testing forms at the PrimeNet server. |
ongoing |
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Search for different kinds of prime numbers at Yves Gallot's Proth Search Page. Submit new primes to the Top 5000 Primes list. See the list of prime numbers that I've found. |
ongoing |
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| Help find factors of really big numbers at NFSnet. | ongoing |
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| Help find new factors of Cunningham numbers at ECMNET. | ongoing |
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| Search for the next prime of the form n!+1 using primeform. | ongoing |
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| Find minimal equal sums of like powers using Euler2000, available on the download page. The client automatically downloads ranges of numbers to work on. | ongoing |
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Search for K-optimal lattice rules in GRISK.
The client will work behind a firewall if your firewall lets through traffic on port 5060/tcp, or if you have a SOCKS firewall. To run it behind a SOCKS firewall, run it with options like the following: java -DsocksProxyHost=<host> -DsocksProxyPort=<port:default=1080> jistributed.JistributedClient krypvier.ii.uib.no A Windows client is available as of November 6, 2000. A Macintosh client should be available soon. The client is available for many other Unix The Delta=7 project was completed on November 15, 2000, and the Delta=8 project has now begun. variants, too. |
d=8: 14.3% |
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| Search for factors of 2^(2^61-1)-1, a double Mersenne number, in the MM61 project. Download and test the client, then email the project coordinator to reserve a range of numbers to test. | ongoing: 1,524 ranges done, 496 to do |
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| Find 3x+1 class records in the
3x+1 Problem
project. This project attempts to find ever higher 3x+1 class records.
The client, which will work on any PC/Windows platform, and the instructions
for joining the project are
here.
Note: the client takes about 6 weeks to finish one block on a 400-MHz
CPU.
See the project's progress. |
ongoing |
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| The
pi(x) project calculates pi(x), for very large values of x. It most
recently calculated pi(x) for x=2*1021. You can
contribute to the calculations for pi(x) for x=2*1022.
Version 1.3 of the client is available as of December 10, 2000. |
ongoing: 71% |
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| Art | |||||
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The electric sheep project uses
an xscreensaver module to
display an animated fractal flame while rendering frames for the next
animation. It is designed for users with Unix and Linux systems who can
compile source code and with high-bandwidth, always-on Internet connections.
It doesn't seem to work through firewalls.
See example images of fractal flames. |
ongoing |
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| Distributed Human Projects | |||||
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Participate in Mindpixel, a project in which you can help teach an artificially intelligent computer program to think more like a human by asking it questions. | ongoing: 312,681 mindpixels | N/A | ||
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Help proofread electronic texts for Project
Gutenberg at the Distributed
Proofreaders Site for Project Gutenberg.
Texts available for second-round proofreading: |
ongoing | N/A | ||
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Help NASA mark craters on
images of Mars.
Note: this web-based project requires you to have Netscape 6, Mozilla, or Internet Explorer version 5 or greater. |
ongoing
65,991 craters marked and 17,233 craters classified |
N/A | ||
