Distributed Computing Project List

[Orange Kid]

First, let us say Welcome!
Here you will find a list of distributed computing projects, most of which TeAm Anandtech participate in. They vary in areas like Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine and many more. Hopefully these listed here will help you decide which project(s) are the most interesting for you.
If you need help or want more info please ask on the forums and we will do our best find an answer for you.


BOINC Projects

These projects all use the BOINC wrapper.
While most are hard coded into BOINC some may have to have their URL added manually.
Once you have BOINC installed go to the 'Tools' tab and select 'Add project'. Select the project you wish to participate in and follow the prompts. Your project will have been add to BOINC and you are on your way.
To join our TeAm go to the project home page and find the "join or create new team" and click on that. It is easiest to do a search for Anandtech. Click on (usually) TeAm AnandTech, then click on 'Join this team'. WELCOME to the TeAm!!!

Acoustics@home
Acoustics@home is a BOINC-based volunteer computing project aimed at solving inverse problems in underwater acoustics. You can contribute to our research by running a free program on your computer.
Jan 2018 Working Project. CPU Only. Windows and Linux

Amicable Numbers
Amicable Numbers is an independent research project that uses Internet-connected computers to find new amicable pairs. You can contribute to our research by running a free program on your computer.
Current goal of the project is to find all amicable pairs with smallest member < 264.
All new findings are published regularly on the Amicable pairs list page.
March 2017 Working Project. CPU, NVIDIA and AMD GPU. Windows and Linux

Asteroids@home
The aim of the project is to derive shapes and spin for a significant part of the asteroid population. As input data, we use any asteroid photometry that is available. The results are asteroid convex shape models with the direction of the spin axis and the rotation period.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU and NVIDIA GPU. Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, and Android.

BURP
BURP aims to develop an open source publicly distributed system for rendering 3D animations. Currently the Blender v2.77 Internal and Cycles rendering engines are supported. Read about getting started and have fun!
This is a BETA project, certain restrictions apply. Not all uploaded sessions will be rendered right away, sometimes the schedulers are down for maintenance.
We are still in the testing phases and do not yet provide the security and stability of a full-blown BOINC project.
Jan. 2018 Working Project. CPU Only.

CAS@home
CAS@home is hosted by the Computing Centre of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, for Chinese scientists with projects studying protein structure, nanotechnology, cancer genomics, and high energy physics.
Jan. 2018 Working Project. CPU Only.

Citizen Science Grid
The Citizen Science Grid is dedicated to supporting a wide range of research and educational projects using volunteer computing and citizen science.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

Climate Prediction
Investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux and Mac.

Collatz Conjecture
Study the Collatz Conjecture, an unsolved conjecture in mathematics
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU, NVIDIA, AMD and INTEL GPU. Windows, Linux, Mac, Android.

Cosmology@home
The goal of Cosmology@Home is to search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical particle physics data.
May 2017 Working Project. CPU Only, Windows, Linux and Mac.

DENIS@Home
DENIS@Home does cardiac electrophysiological simulations, studying the electrical activity of the heart.
March 2017, Working project. CPU only. Windows, Linux and Mac.

DHEP
DHEP allows you to host an island running a Genetic Algorithm in a coevolutionary setting synthesising future super-reliable electronics such as those used in autonomous vehicles, power stations, medical equipment, aerospace. These are of increasingly paramount importance as more and more human lives rely on well functioning hardware.
Jan.2019 Working Project. CPU Only, Windows, Linux, Mac.

DrugDiscovery@home
DrugDiscovery@Home is a distributed computing project, which uses the power of different computing devices worldwide (PC, GPUs, smartphones, clusters etc.). The computing time is kindly provided by volunteers, who want to make their impact into discovery of new drugs for the most dangerous and widespread diseases.
Jan. 2018, Working Project. CPU and NVIDIA GPU. Windows and Linux.

Einstein@home
Search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors, and from the Arecibo radio observatory. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPU. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

Enigma@home
Attempt to decode 3 original Enigma messages. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken.
March 2017, Working project. CPU only. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

FiND@Home
The parasite that causes malaria continues to evolve resistance to available medication. We therefore urgently need to discover new drugs, targeting new proteins in the parasite. The FiND@Home project is aimed at finding these new targets.

Gerasim@home
Testing and comparison of heuristic methods for getting separations of parallel algorithms working in the CAD system for designing logic control systems
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA GPU. Windows only.

GPUGrid
GPUGrid.net opens novel computational scenarios by the first full-atom molecular dynamics code (CellMD) specially optimized to run on NVIDIA GPUs. New biomedical applications suddenly become possible giving a new role to computational biology for biomedical research.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU(Linux only). NVIDIA GPU, Windows and Linux.

LHC@home
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. It is the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate on particles proprieties. LHC@home runs simulations to improve the design of LHC and its detectors.
VLHCatHome and ATLAS@Home are now part of this project.
March 2017, Working project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux and Mac

Majestic12
Notice: As of 5 July 2014 Project continued for existing members only
From today we are stopping accepting NEW project members, however the project continues for those who have already joined it!
This software will use your connection to crawl for data and send it back to main server where it will be indexed and made available for actual searches. You will need to have unmetered broadband connection (you can limit the amount of bandwidth to be used), reasonably fast CPU (2000 Mhz+ or better) and 2GB of RAM. Actual usage of memory depends on your settings, with default ones resulting in 50-60Mb usage at any time.

Milkyway@home
The goal of Milkyway@Home is to create a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
MilkyWay@H - Benchmark thread and discussion by Assimilator1
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU, AMD and NVIDIA GPU. Windows, Linux, and Mac.

MindModeling@home
MindModeling@Home uses computational cognitive process modeling to better understand the human mind, and specifically to study the mechanisms and processes that enable and moderate human performance and learning.
September 2017 Working project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux and Mac.

Moo! Wrapper
Run applications from distributed.net
March 2017, Working project. CPU, NVIDIA and AMD GPU. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

NFS@home
NFS@Home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do the lattice sieving step in the Number Field Sieve factorization of large integers. As a young school student, you gained your first experience at breaking an integer into prime factors, such as 15 = 3 * 5 or 35 = 5 * 7. NFS@Home is a continuation of that experience, only with integers that are hundreds of digits long.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux, Mac and FreeBSD.

NumberFields@home
NumberFields@home searches for fields with special properties. The primary application of this research is in the realm of algebraic number theory. Number theorists can mine the data for interesting patterns to help them formulate conjectures about number fields. Ultimately, this research will lead to a deeper understanding of the profound properties of numbers, the basic building blocks of all mathematics.
April 2017 Working Project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux and Mac

ODLK
A Latin square project.
Jan. 2018 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

ODLK1
BOINC-project ODLK1 continues to solve the problem of BOINC-project ODLK.
The project generates a database of canonical forms (CF) of diagonal Latin squares (DLS) of order 10 having orthogonal diagonal Latin squares (ODLS).
Jan. 2018, Working Project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

PRIMABOINCA
Search for counterexamples to two conjectures related to the identification of prime numbers

PrimeGrid
Primegrid has multiple projects searching for different forms of very large prime numbers, including searching for the largest known prime number.
PrimeGrid: CPU benchmarks and discussion by StefanR5R
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU, NVIDIA and AMD GPU. Windows, Linux and Mac.

Quake Catcher Network
Quake-Catcher Network uses sensors attached to computers and smartphones to detect seismic waves.

Radioactive@home
Radioactive@Home is creating a free and continuously updated map of radiation levels using sensors connected to volunteers' computers. You must buy a sensor to participate.

RakeSearch
RakeSearch is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to search for orthogonal diagonal Latin squares. You can contribute to our research by running a free program on your computer.
Jan.2018, Working Project. CPU Only. Windows and Linux.

RNA World
RNA World seeks to identify, analyze, structurally predict and design RNA molecules on the basis of established bioinformatics software.

Rosetta@home
Determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running Rosetta@home you will help us speed up and extend our research in ways we couldn't possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping our efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer, and Alzheimer's.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

RALPH@home
RALPH@home is the official alpha test project for Rosetta@home. New application versions, work units, and updates in general will be tested here before being used for production. The goal for RALPH@home is to improve Rosetta@home.

SAT@Home
Solve hard and practically important problems (discrete functions inversion problems, discrete optimization, bioinformatics, etc.) that can be effectively reduced to Boolean satisfiability problem.

Seti@home
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
March 2017, Working project. CPU, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPU. Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

SRBase
SRBase is a mathematical research project that uses Internet-connected computers trying to solve Sierpinski / Riesel Bases up to 1030.
September 2017 Working Project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux and Mac.

TN-Grid
TN-Grid is a platform that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in various scientific projects.
March 2017, Working project CPU Only. Windows, Linux and Mac.

Universe@Home
Universe@Home aims to create the first database of the simulated stellar content of the Universe, from the earliest stars to the most exotic black hole binaries.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU and AMD GPU. Windows, Linux and Android.

VGTU project@Home
The aim of this project is to provide a powerful distributed computing platform for scientists of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) as well as others Lithuanian academic institutions.
March 2017, Working project. CPU Only. Windows and Linux.

WEP-M+2 Project
WEP-M+2 (wanless2) is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in number theory. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
WEP-M+2 is based at London, UK, and is currently investigating factorization of Mersenneplustwo numbers.
Jan. 2018 Working Project. CPU Only. Linux and Mac.

World Community Grid
To further critical non-profit research on some of humanity's most pressing problems by creating the world's largest volunteer computing grid. Research includes HIV-AIDS, cancer, tropical and neglected diseases, solar energy, clean water and many more.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU Only. Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.

XANSONS for COD
XANSONS for COD is a research project aimed to create an open access database of simulated x-ray and neutron powder diffraction patterns for nanocrystalline phase of the materials presented in the Crystallography Open Database (COD). You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
Jan. 2018 Working Project. CPU, NVIDIA, AMD and INTEL GPU. Windows, Linux and Mac.

Yafu
YAFU is a alpha project, which main goal is
to test the latest BOINC server code for bugs, please report any error which you find in the webpages in the forum
to factorize numbers up to 140 digit length which are needed to bring Aliquot Sequences to a size of at least 140.
to test the latest versions of yafu.
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows and Linux.

Yoyo@home
Yoyo@home is an adapter between BOINC and several existing volunteer computing projects: ECM, Muon, Evolution@home, and distributed.net
Jan. 2017 Working Project. CPU only. Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris and Android.


NON BOINC Projects

These are stand alone projects which have their own installers.

distributed.net
To join our TeAm go here and click on 'I Want To Join This Team'.
distributed.net was the Internet's first general-purpose distributed computing project.
Founded in 1997, our network has grown to include thousands of volunteers around the world donating the power of their home computers, cell phones and tablets to academic research and public-interest projects. Join us today in this ground-breaking cloud computing experience! We need your help...
It's very simple to participate in our projects. You only need to download a small program, which will talk to our network and begin to process work immediately. The program uses only the computer's idle time, so when you want to use your computer, it will automatically get out of your way. Plus, there's that cute little cow icon...
Also available as Cruncher ogr under Yoyo@home and RC5-72 is under Moo! Wrapper if you want to contribute and get BOINC credit.

DPAD
To join our TeAm put "[TA]" with the brackets but not the quotes in front of you user name.
Here you can use your own PC's idle time to simulate and design parts of a particle accelerator.
Also available on Yoyo@home as Muon if you want to contribute and get BOINC credit

Folding@Home
To join our TeAm use Team ID 198 when setting up your client.
Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer.
Getting the most PPD out of your hardware for F@H and discussion by Markfw

GIMPS
Since it's foundation in 1996, GIMPS has discovered 15 Mersenne primes so far. Could you be next?

Just a few of the major projects, look for more on the Free-DC side menu
Most of the other projects have changed over to the BOINC format, .

Other sources for project info, lots more than listed here.

BOINC at Berkeley

Free-DC

BOINC Stats

I have only listed projects that are currently working.
There are other projects that are viable but don't seem to have much of a TeAm presence.
I will continue to go through some of the projects and list them here as I can.
Please let me know if I have missed any major ones that people are contributing to.

EDITS will be an ongoing thing

 

[Smoke]

I want to personally thank Orange Kid for this great synopsis of DC Projects.

 

[Orange Kid]

I will try to test all the listed projects to be sure the are working and post comments then...but won't happen till after the first of the year.

 

[Fardringle]

Thank you for getting this going again. I just haven't had time to keep the old list updated for quite a while and most of the info there is badly out of date.

 

[StefanR5R]

For newbies who wonder which distributed computing project to join, it is also important to know whether their hardware would be effective or ineffective in the various projects. Here is an incomplete list from what I have learned so far:

Projects which offer both CPU clients and GPU clients:

• Several such projects exist. In those, the GPU client may easily be one or two magnitudes faster than the CPU client, making the latter rather obsolete.
• Example: Folding@Home offers several types of GPU and CPU work units with quite different performance characteristics, the former being generally much faster than the latter.

CPU-only projects (i.e. no GPU client which would steal the CPU's show):

• World Community Grid (for the time being)
• Rosetta@Home
• several subprojects of PrimeGrid (but they have GPU-centric subprojects also)

CPUs with AVX:

• certain subprojects of PrimeGrid (LLR projects)
• Folding@Home 0xa7 work units (only intermittently available)

Large multi-core CPUs; dual- and quad-socket computers:

• In the majority of distributed computing projects, performance will scale linearly with the number of CPU cores in a machine, by spawning as many worker processes as there are cores. Thus it does not matter for performance whether you have N cores in a single machine, or several machines with a total sum of N cores.
• Hyperthreading may help or may hurt, depending on the project.
• Folding@Home 0xa4 work units, which currently make up the bulk of F@H's CPU WUs, profit from executing one work on as many cores as possible. E.g. one CPU slot with 8 cores will earn more credits than two CPU slots with 4 cores each. This is because F@H gives credit not only for the amount of work done, but also for how quickly any one work unit was done. 0xa4 units are currently only available for up to 24 cores though. And in the end, GPU clients are still a lot faster than large CPU clients chewing on 0xa4 WUs.
• Folding@Home 0xa7 WUs scale easily to a lot more CPU cores than 0xa4 WUs. A 2P workstation with large, modern CPUs can thus work about as effectively as a large 28nm-class consumer GPU. However, 0xa7 WUs are only intermittently available.

GPUs:

• Many projects support NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs, but Intel integrated graphics are rarely supported.
• Very old GPUs may not be supported, depending on the project.
• Certain old or new driver revisions may not be supported, depending on the project.
• Depending on the project, the GPU client will additionally need a fraction of a CPU core or an entire CPU core for support. Example: Folding@Home's NVIDIA GPU client requires much or all of one CPU core per GPU. A slow or overloaded CPU could reduce the GPU client's performance notably. In contrast, F@H's AMD GPU client requires only very little CPU time for support.

GPUs with double-precision support (a.k.a. FP64):

• MilkyWay@Home

(Please correct and amend.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

but Intel integrated graphics are rarely supported.

Collatz specifically supports the newer Intel iGPUs that are capable of executing OpenCL tasks.

(Which I think means Haswell or newer.)

 

[StefanR5R]

SETI@home is another project which supports Intel iGPU.
Caveat: iGPU shares power budget, thermal ceiling, and memory bandwidth with the CPU.

 

[Ken g6]

GPUs with double-precision support (a.k.a. FP64):

PrimeGrid's GFN projects, and any future prime searches on the GPU, will require double-precision support.

 

[Orange Kid]

A few updates for 2018. Removed a couple of dead projects and added new ones.

 

[petrusbroder]

Thanks, Orange Kid!

 

[TennesseeTony]

The dDM project (distributed data mining) has closed up shop.


************************
**********EDIT**********
************************

http://www.distributeddatamining.org/

The DistributedDataMining project is shutting down!
Dear ddm users,
we had a good run during the last years and the computing power which you provided enabled many researchers to achieve there scientific goals.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to invest as much time as I wanted into maintaining the ddm project and although the BOINC client was working fine most of the time, the page had more and more problems which were not addressed properly. I was thinking about shuting down the project many times but there was never the right moment.

Recently, this changed when a critical vulnerability of the Drupal content management system was publicly announced. Since the ddm website was running an old version of Drupal, no fix is available for this issue. As a consequence, I took the website down. There are no indications that the vulnerability was exploited. The actual BOINC server is running on a different machine and would not have been effected anyway.

I had the choice between (1) updating to the latest Drupal version including the time consuming re-integration of all the BOINC features and (2) shutting down the project for good. I decided that this is the right moment to let it come to an end. I simply do not have the time to operate the project in the way that you would deserve.

From now on, no new workunits will be generated. The remaining units will be distributed to the BOINC clients and the incomming results will be processed as usuall. The BOINC statistics which are frequently crawled by multiple websites will stay online for a while, so that your credits won't be lost.

Thank you for your understanding and all your support during the last years.

Best regards,
Nico

 

[Orange Kid]

The dDM project (distributed data mining) has closed up shop.

I will remove it. Thanks

 

[Orange Kid]

2019, added DHEP, removed dead ones.