Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects
 
News and Articles   Active Projects   Upcoming Projects  
Recently Completed Projects   Past Projects  
Tools   Development Platforms   Conferences   Parody and Fun Sites   Links   Politics
 
last updated December 24, 2001 editor: Kirk Pearson
 
Updates
December 24, 2001
  • Genome@Homeupdated their news page on December 21, 2001. They mention a January release of their new client and other interesting developments.
  • GRISK completed its Delta=8 project on December 21, 2001 and immediately began its Delta=9 project
  • added links to old versions of this website at the bottom of the main index page
  • stats updates for various projects
  • this will be the last update of this site until after January 2, 2002. Happy holidays everyone!
December 20, 2001 December 17, 2001
  • new Active Distributed Human project: Zeal (similar to the dmoz Open Directory project)
  • DataSynapse has discontinued its membership program, including member incentives, effective immediately
  • version 0.76b of the Sengent Drug Design Optimization Lab client is available as of December 14, 2001
  • version 0.7 of the Übero client is available as of December 15, 2001; if you are running 0.6, you must upgrade
  • new news article: Sengent teams with Sun
 
December 14, 2001 December 10, 2001
  • new Upcoming Life Sciences project: DECRYPTHON. The project website is written in French.
  • new Links site with in-depth project reviews: psio.net
December 6, 2001

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What is Distributed Computing?

Distributed computing is a science which solves a large problem by giving small parts of the problem to many computers to solve and then combining the solutions for the parts into a solution for the problem. Recent distributed computing projects have been designed to use the computers of hundreds of thousands of volunteers all over the world, via the Internet, to look for extra-terrestrial radio signals, to look for prime numbers so large that they have more than one million digits, and to find more effective drugs to fight the AIDS virus. These projects are so large, and require so much computing power to solve, that they would be impossible for any one computer or person to solve in a reasonable amount of time.

This site is designed for non-technical people who are interested in learning about, and participating in, public, Internet-based projects which apply distributed computing science to solving real-world problems.

ThinkQuest has an excellent educational site which describes distributed computing, its history, and some of the current distributed computing projects. The site is available in English, Français, and Español.
An article about distributed computing by Byte Magazine.
A great, detailed overview of distributed computing by American Scientist.
Another overview, from the Cosm Project.

Major Areas of this Site
accessible by the links near the top of each page

News and Articles News stories, informational articles, and press releases about Internet-based distributed computing companies and projects
Active Projects Information, statistics and links for distributed computing projects that are active right now and that you can participate in
Upcoming Projects Information and links for distributed computing projects that are in development
Recently Completed Projects Information, statistics, and links for distributed computing projects that have been completed recently
Past Projects Information, statistics, and links for distributed computing projects that have been completed in the past and/or are no longer active
Tools Information and links for tools to support participants in distributed computing projects
Development Platforms Information and links for development platforms that you can use to create a distributed computing project
Conferences Information and links for conferences about distributed computing research and applications
Parody and Fun Sites Information and links for sites that make fun of major distributed computing projects. SETI@home seems to be a popular target :-)
Links Links to other sites which have distributed computing project links
Politics Information and links about political problems around distributed computing projects and users
 
This site does not cover P2P projects (which are more about file sharing than about distributed computing), private distributed computing projects (projects in which the general public can't participate), or projects that research ways to do distributed computing. If you are looking for that kind of information, you won't find it here.
Click on the following links to see how this site and distributed computing looked in past years: 2000



Questions? Comments? Know of a site or project that isn't listed here? Found a broken or outdated link? Send me email.