DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
Which in plain English means shared computing power, your home PC. There are many projects running across the Internet which aim to use a little of your PCs free cycles. Combined with hundreds or even thousands of other users, free super-computing is available to anyone who cares to advertise.
Some problems are so complex that even organisations with supercomputers cannot tackle them—either the equipment cost is massive or the problem takes too long to solve. Exploiting the high numbers of overpowered PCs connected to the net running at a fraction of their capacity, some clever bods decided to do something about it. What they did was write a piece of software which allows the user at home to number crunch a small piece of data, then send the results back. When multiplied by thousands, these fragments soon amount to vast swathes of information.
Obvious benefits to commercial or research companies are lower costs (saved them the cost of another Kray!), faster results as more and more PC-owners sign-up and even better results, SETI@Home have added more maths over time, taking advantage of faster home PCs and even to slow work unit uploads easing the burden on their struggling servers!
As the profile of notable projects such as SETI become more famous, other projects jumped on the bandwagon. Today you are not limited to searching for little Green men. Some aim to make you famous, some have prize money and other are more philanthropic and aim to cure diseases.
There are plenty of projects out there, so if you would like to contribute, here are some of the choices available to you:
It appears to be the oldest Distributed Computing project on the web (thanks for the steer David!). Running since 1996 serving boths science and Mamon ($100,000 prize for the first ten million digit prime number) Mesenne is looking for new prime numbers.
Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians. An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only divisors are one and itself. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, etc. There are only 39 known Mersenne primes.
GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, was formed in January 1996 to discover new world-record-size Mersenne primes. GIMPS harnesses the power of thousands of small computers like yours to search for these "needles in a haystack".
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyses radio telescope data.
Being the most well known project going, their own spiel pretty much says it all. Help find ET and get famous. There are two flavours of PC download, a screen saver and a DOS version which processes the data quicker, but with no eye candy. Download
Quite why you would want to contribute some computing power to a scientific project aimed at Chess is baffling at first. The goal is the creation of artificial neural networks capable of playing chess. Again using a screensaver, your PC displays animations of chess game, which it downloaded. Completely unrelated to the games on display, a parallel process in the background will perform an evolutionary algorithm and send its results back. One for the Chess nuts amongst us I guess. Download
Understanding how proteins self-assemble ("protein folding") is a holy grail of modern molecular biophysics. The programme acts as before but the payoff is if/when successful a cure for Altzheimers disease is in the offing. Not something to worry about in your teens, unless you live exclusively on Hamburgers (Moo!), but as we all get old it might be worthwhile contributing to the cure before your dotage. Not dribbling in public seems reason enough. Download
FightAIDSatHome, a computational research project partnership between Entropia and the Olson laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, uses your computer to assist AIDS research.
Your part in the Fight against Aids (other than Safe Sex) is to help generate an ideal system to model the evolution of drug resistance and design anti-HIV drugs necessary to fight AIDS. Which fortunately enough, is exactly what their programme does. Download
Fermat numbers have a very beautiful mathematical form: 22^m+1. The first 5 numbers F0=3, F1=5, F2=17, F3=257, F4=65537 are all prime. Having discovered this fact, Pierre Fermat assumed that all numbers of this type were prime. But he was mistaken. In 1732 after almost a century, Euler elegantly proved that F5 had a factor: 641 and was therefore not prime. This year can be considered as the beginning of the search for dividers of other Fermat numbers. For 3 centuries more than 200 dividers were found. It has been proven that all divisors of Fermat numbers have the simple form: k.2n+1, where n > m+2. This corollary is being used for discovery of Fermat number dividers.
Flobble, dobble, flip-flop. I have no idea what all that guff means, but the good news is because of the scarcity and difficulty of finding these dividers, the person who discovers a new factor takes his place in history. ET or a big number for your place in a history book, might be worth investing in a dual processor system and do both :) Download
The Intel® Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program
Winner of the "I've got the longest title" award 2002 goes to Intel, who, bless their cotton socks very kindly host several projects under one roof, which makes finder things a bit easier, even if the site is undeserving of a Plain English Award.
The Intel® Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program combats life-threatening illnesses by linking millions of PCs like yours into one of the most powerful computing resources in the world. This "virtual supercomputer" uses peer-to-peer technology to make unprecedented amounts of processing power available to medical researchers, thus accelerating the development of treatments and drugs with the potential to cure diseases. Offer 4 different research options
This page links in to several other sites under the United Devices banner...
Have 3 worthy causes for you to help with:
- Anthrax - The Anthrax Research Project will take advantage of and build upon the success of the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project. Like that project, the Anthrax Research Project relies on volunteered computers to screen billions of drug-like molecules. The individual "virtual" molecules are screened for binding capacity on a protein known to have a role in anthrax's toxicity to humans. Download
- Cancer - The research centres on proteins that have been determined to be a possible target for cancer therapy. Through a process called "virtual screening", special analysis software will identify molecules that interact with these proteins, and will determine which of the molecular candidates has a high likelihood of being developed into a drug. The process is similar to finding the right key to open a special lock—by looking at millions upon millions of molecular keys. Download
- HMMER - Knowing how DNA works is crucial to finding new treatments and cures for disease. If scientists can find out exactly which parts of DNA control eye functions, they may be able to help cure certain eye diseases. Since all biological functions can eventually be traced back to DNA, successful genetic research could provide mankind with a tremendous supply of disease fighting knowledge. Download
RSA Labs is offering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. Basically this is a brute force and ignorance effort. Your PC is given the encoded material and the simply tries consecutive number. The only problem is the key is some 250 characters long and this takes time. Grab the file, join a group, decode the key for cash. Download
Electric Sheep (named after the short story - a very dull one too- by Phillip K Dick - it was fleshed out and filmed as Blade Runner) is yet another screensaver upon which an animated 'sheep' appears. This is not a fluffy thing destined to be covered in Mint Sauce though, it is an animated factual flame, and looks very nice too. What actually happens is the programme contacts an Internet server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep. Beautiful images result. Currently there are only Linux & Mac versions :( Worth visiting the sight simply for the images.
D2OL which aims to find a cure for SARS...
D2OL, was first to use computational methods
to deploy targets against Anthrax, Smallpox and Ebola, and now is first
to have a credible SARS target (A target conserved between pig and human
coronovirus, the suspected virus behind SARS). Download
CONCLUSION
So you can do it for any number of reasons, the good and benefit of mankind, cash, love of chess or even art. Whatever the reason, if you have an Internet connection, and if you're reading this article that's a rhetorical question, it is worth your time using whichever distributed computing project that appeals to you. Most of them have minimal processor hits and/or idle when you PC is busy. All of them have dedicate sites and plenty of optimising tips to allow you to get the best out of them.
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