Distributed Computing
Distributed computing programs are designed to allocate chunks of processing to many computers throughout the world in order to complete computations that would otherwise take an extremely long time, even on a supercomputer.
Available Projects
Known distributed computing projects include:
- Folding@Home (Protein Folding)
- Einstein@Home (Gravity Waves)
- Genome@home
- SETI@Home (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
- PrimeNet (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search)
- distributed.net
I am considering starting Academy teams on these sites, just for kicks, to see how much processing the Academy can dole out for the sake of science. If there is enough interest (i.e. 4 people), in any of these projects, I will start an Academy team and post the team numbers here.
There are more of these projects out there, so if you've got your own preferred project, add it to the list. Here is a list of active projects, so if you find one you want us to get in on, add it.
Folding@Home
Folding@Home is a Stanford run project that computes protein folding. While you may know that proteins have specific amino acid sequences, part of their functionality comes from the shape that results when the protein folds on itself, and Folding@Home is working to understand how proteins take these shapes.
The client can be found here. For Linux users, simply chmod +x the program and run it, and it'll get going on its own. I would suggest giving it its own folder, so you don't accidentally delete something important.
The Academy team number is 41760. Enter this as you set up your client for the first time.
Genome@home
Genome@home is also run by Stanford, in an attempt to understand more about how genes work. This, combined with the research gained from the folding project, should increase our overall understanding of the gene->protein process and eventually allow us to be able to synthesize genes and make new proteins that would behave predictably.
This project uses the Folding@Home client, so you'll have to check the Genome@home page for how to configure it to run Genome instead of Folding.
SETI@Home
Download the client here, and make sure to read the instructions (for I have not).
PrimeNet
The goal of PrimeNet is to find as many Mersenne primes (primes that fit the description 2p-1) as they can. In May 2004, the 41st Mersenne was found (224,036,583-1, which is around 7 million digits long). As I write this, the PrimeNet grid is doing about 15005 gigaflops, which is absolutely nuts even if you don't know what flops (floating point operations per second) are.
You can get the software here. This is not a project in which you can work in teams, but neat nonetheless.
distributed.net
This is a particularly geeky distributed computing site that seems to be largely into mathematical and computational problems, such as encryption stress-testing and finding rulers such that no two marks are the same distance apart as any other pair of two marks.
Clients can be found here.
