Custom/Uncategorized Platforms

Custom software encompasses distributed computing projects that do not make use of a third-party generic client-server infrastructure or which use one other than those listed above.

Active projects

* Mathematics
o 15k Search [2] Automated search for large titanic prime numbers, of special forms.
o Background Pi [3] Computes decimal digits of pi using digit extraction method.
o Cuboid simulation project (important for industry, biophysics and statistics) [4] You roll a six-sided die with parallel faces but non-equal edge lengths. What is the probability to land on each surface ?
o GIMPS — Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, dedicated to finding ever larger Mersenne primes.
o NFSNET — uses the Number Field Sieve to factor increasingly large integers.
o PiSegment — Chinese Volunteer Computing Project with the dual purpose of looking for a large number of digits for the number Pi and making Volunteer Computing more popular in China. Only a Windows client only at this time though.
o Seventeen or Bust — attempts to find prime numbers in 17 sequences, to solve the Sierpinski problem. So far primes in 11 sequences have been found.
* Internet
o AssessGRID [5] Addresses obstacles to a wide adoption of Grid technologies by bringing risk management and assessment to this field, enabling use of Grid computing in business and society.
o A-Ware [6] will develop a stable, supported, commercially exploitable, high quality technology to give easy access to Grid resources.
o BREIN — uses the Semantic Web and Multi-agent Systems to build simple and reliable Grid systems for business. [7]
o Cohesion Platform [8] is a Java-based modular Peer-to-Peer multi-application Desktop Grid computing platform for irregularly structured problems developed at the University of Tübingen (Germany).
o DIMES — is a distributed computing project which maps the structure and evolution of the Internet infrastructure, allowing users to see how the Internet looks from their home.
o Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
o GridCOMP [9] — provides an advanced component platform for an effective invisible Grid.
o GridECON [10] takes a user-oriented perspective and creates solutions to grid challenges to promote the wide-spread use of grids.
o Hours — Ongoing project HarmOny and Useful Resource Sharing. Attempts to make use of the trust management and network economics to implement the heterogeneous resource sharing. Currently focusing on the resource allocation in the science grid like Teragrid and OSG. This project is run by the MIST group of Computer Science at Wayne State University.[11]
o JHDC — Open source programmable Java distributed computing system.
o Legion — Grid computing platform developed at the University of Virginia.
o Majestic-12 — Uses a distributed web crawler program to index web sites for a distributed search engine.
o NESSI-GRID [12] aims to provide a unified view for European research in Services Architectures and Software Infrastructures that will define technologies, strategies and deployment policies fostering new, open, industrial solutions and societal applications that enhance the safety, security and well-being of citizens.
o OMII-Europe [13] an EU-funded project which has been established to source key software components that can interoperate across several heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.
o OMII-UK [14] provides free Open Source software and support to enable a sustained future for the UK e-Research community.
o OurGrid — aims to deliver grid technology that can be used today by current users to solve present problems. To achieve this goal, OurGrid chooses a different trade-off compared to most grid projects. It forfeits supporting arbitrary applications in favor of supporting only Bag-of-Tasks applications.
o ScottNet NCG — This is a distributed neural computing grid. A private commercial effort in continuous operation since 1995. This system performs a series of functions including data synchronization amongst databases, mainframe systems, and other data repositories. E-Commerce transaction processing, automated research and data retrieval, content analysis, web site monitoring, scripted and dynamic user emulation, shipping and fulfillment API integration and management, RSS and NNTP monitoring and analysis, real time security enforcement, and backup / restore functionality.[15]
o Storage@home — distributed storage infrastructure developed to solve the problem of backing up and sharing petabytes of scientific results using a distributed model of volunteer managed hosts. Data is maintained by a mixture of replication and monitoring, with repairs done as needed.
* Biology
o Bio4All ToolKits - genetic annotation tools for responsible research [30]
o CommunityTSC - design drugs to treat patients afflicted with Tuberous sclerosis.
o D2OL — works to discover drug candidates against Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola and SARS and other potentially devastating infectious diseases. (Uses Java VM)
o Evolution@Home — addressing fundamental questions about evolution and population genetics.
o Folding@Home — run by Stanford University and whose goal is to understand why proteins misfold.
o SharkGrid — is a small grid for whale shark (Rhincdon typus) photo-identification.[31]
* Chemistry
o Chemomentum [16] evaluation and risk assessment of chemicals.
* Earth Sciences
o Climateprediction.net — seeks to forecast the climate of the Earth in the 21st century. The original windows client is in process of being retired. At this time the windows client is used for Open University classes only.
* Art
o Electric Sheep — An open source screen-saver for animating and evolving abstract animations.
* Physics
o EON — run by The University of Texas at Austin and whose goal is to understand condensed matter physics. EON uses Cosm client architecture and also Fida. [17]
o Muon1 [18] — Optimises the design of a particle collider which will be used to measure the mass of neutrinos.
o Stardust@home — Scans/Analyzes the collection grid from a recent NASA mission to capture particles from a comet.
* Cryptography
o freerainbowtables.com — generating perfect rainbow tables.[32]
* Miscellaneous
o BEinGRID — Business Experiments in Grid. Also See Gridipedia
o Gstock — Investment Strategy Search, dedicated to finding ever better technical analysis strategies.
o MoneyBee — Generates stock forecasts by application of artificial intelligence with the aid of artificial neural networks.
o Perplex City — an Alternate Reality Game created by the British company Mind Candy, features puzzle cards which can be solved to earn points on a leaderboard and earn clues to help understand the game. One of these cards, "The 13th Labour", features what players have determined to be a block of RC5-64bit encryption, which is now being brute-forced, using a distributed computing client created by one player.
o StrataGenie [19] — searches for trading strategies in intraday stock market data and distributes trading signals to subscribers.

Completed projects

* BBC Climate Change Experiment (part of Climateprediction.net)
* DHEP [20] — automatically design self-diagnosing hardware (now closed).
* Distributed Folding — was doing work similar to that of Folding@home, but with a genetic algorithm to attempt to improve the results over time. Distributed Folding closed on October 5, 2004.
* FAFNER
* Find-a-drug — a non-profit organisation using Internet-based computing for drug discovery. Preliminary results from the Cancer and HIV projects are very promising. Project ended on December 16, 2005.
* Lifemapper — Attempted to build global archive of biological species distributions.
* PiHex — found the 40 billionth bit of Pi on September 11, 2000.
* Screensaver Lifesaver — A project being carried out by Oxford University's Centre for Computational Drug Discovery, sponsored by the NFCR, attempts to find cures for various cancers.
* ZetaGrid — verification of Riemann's hypothesis.
* Grid.org — A grid computing platform funded by United Devices as a testbed for its own software, hosting large scale research studies. Closed on April 27, 2007.
* United Devices Cancer Research Project — find drugs for pancreatic cancer and leukemia. Closed on April 27, 2007.

Abandoned projects

These projects were either abandoned outright or in some cases merged with other larger ongoing projects.

* MD5CRK — Attempted to crack the commonly used cryptographic hash function MD5. This project ended August 24, 2004 due to findings by Wang, Feng, Lai, and Yu.
* Popular Power
* Entropia
* Genome@home — due to lack of funding, merged with Folding@home.
* TivoCrack

Volunteer distributed computing projects

Popular projects in volunteer distributed computing include[33] :
Project Start Affiliation Area Peak_#hosts Current status
GIMPS 1994 ? mathematics 10,000 active
distributed.net 1997 U.S. non-profit organization cryptography 100,000 active
SETI@home 1999 University of California, Berkeley SETI 362,000 active
Electric Sheep 1999 ? art 57,000 active
Folding@home 2000 Stanford University biology 275,000 active
Grid.org 2002 philanthropic by United Devices biomedicine, other 3,734,000[34] closed
Climateprediction.net 2003 University of Oxford climate change 150,000 active
LHC@home 2004 CERN physics 60,000 active
World Community Grid 2004 philanthropic by IBM biomedicine, other 700,000[34] active
Einstein@home 2005 LIGO astrophysics 200,000 active
Rosetta@home 2005 University of Washington biology 100,000 active

Physical infrastructure projects

These projects attempt to make large physical computation infrastructures available for researchers to use:

* Teragrid
* Open Science Grid
* VirginiaTech
* Institut Ruđer Bošković (IRB) Debian Cluster Components
* SARA Computing and Networking Services in Netherlands
* Berkeley NOW Project

Other distributed computing software platforms

The following are generic software platforms or infrastructures used to implement some of the projects listed in the previous section.

* Acute — Distributed functional programming with migration based on OCaml.
* Alchemi — A .NET-based system for building enterprise Grids and applications.
* Amoeba — distributed operating system that is designed for distributed computing tasks.
* Beowulf clusters — Linux based parallel computing using commodity hardware.
* Condor — a flexible high-throughput distributed computing scheduler
* Distributed objects — systems like CORBA, Microsoft D/COM, Java RMI, and others that try to map object oriented design onto the network.
* DragonFly BSD — an operating system aiming to support SSI clustering
* Enomalism — Virtualized Management Dashboard
* Fujitsu SynfiniWay — Grid middleware that is used to optimize data and execution processes.
* Globus Toolkit — an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications
* GreenTea Software — a Java-based P2P generic distributed network computing platform that transmits code and data on-demand to run on heterogeneous OS's.
* Gridbus Toolkit — an open source software toolkit used for building market-oriented Grid systems and applications
* Grid MP — an infrastructure created by United Devices, used to run grid.org, and is one of the infrastructures used by World Community Grid.
* JPPF — an open source computational grid toolkit focused on performance and ease of use
* JSTM — uses a java Software Transactional Memory implementation for distributed object replication.
* Popular Power — (Defunct) building a platform for Internet-wide distributed computing.
* ProActive ProActive is a Java middleware (part of the ObjectWeb consortium, with Open Source code) for parallel, distributed and multi-threaded computing.
* RPyC — Remote Python Call, a platform for building distributed applications.
* Sun Grid Engine — a distributed resource management system, similar to Condor
* UNICORE — an open source software platform for supporting Grid systems and applications
* Vaakya — software developed by Vaakya Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a Bangalore-based company. It has its own language and different frameworks (e.g. business application components, handheld devices, 3D graphics) that allow ISVs to develop applications, particularly for businesses, that run entirely on premises on ordinary work stations, not expensive servers.
* XGE — a Windows-based product which distributes tasks on a local network by virtualizing filesystem access.
* Xgrid — software developed by Apple's Advanced Computation Group.