|Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects|
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|Past Distributed Computing Projects|
|Project Information||Completion Date||Project Duration||Total Number of Participants/Computers|
|Distributed Genetic Programming on the Internet used genetic programming in a Java applet to navigate artificial ants along the Santa Fe trail.
The website was removed in October, 2000. The project had some interesting graphics.
|Golomb Rulers - The Search For 20 and 21!, the first Internet-based distributed project to find optimal golomb rulers (OGRs). The project found OGRs for 20, 21, 22, and 23 marks. The project tested 628 trillion nodes for the 22-mark ruler and 398 trillion nodes for the 23-mark ruler. The OGR search is continuing at distributed.net.||May, 1999||2.5 years||unknown|
|Swiss Knife Software had a screen saver application which tried to solve the Eternity puzzle.||stopped in July, 1999; not completed||unknown||not applicable|
|The Internet Animation '99
"was an experimental project aimed to discover how a computer 3D animation
could have been done using people from all over the world and coordinating
everything using only email and a web page." You can
download the movie from ifilm.
This site has a Lessons Learned page and other information for people who want to start their own animation collaboration projects.
|August, 1999||2 years||unknown|
|The ECC2K-108 project solved Certicom's ECC2k-108 Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm challenge.||April 4, 2000||4 months||1300/9500|
|PiHex caluclated the quadrillionth digit of Pi (which is 0). The creator of the PiHex project will soon begin more complex projects at idlepower.net.||September 11, 2000||24 months||1246/1734 (1.2 million CPU hours)|
XPulsar@Home was a Monte-Carlo Java
applet simulation run by the Astrophysics department at the
University of Tuebingen in Germany to model the spreading of X-ray
photons in X-ray pulsars.
The site is in German, but you can use a free machine translator to see reasonable translations of the site's pages.
|March 31, 2001||12 months||8432/? (1.2 million CPU hours)|
|DCypher.net was designed to run multiple and different types of projects. It ran a CSC decryption contest and a project to design safer storage vessels for nuclear waste. For the gamma flux project it processed almost 100 million work units. DCypher.net was the first project to use weekly cash giveaways to encourage participation. The project's parent company, Distributed Science, went out of business on May 24, 2001. The project shut down soon afterward.||May, 2001||1 year||unknown|
|May, 2001||4 months||unknown|
|The perceive.net cloudmakers project attempted to solve a puzzle called RUR-14 (the puzzle is described at the cloudmakers website: this puzzle is connected to the Kubrick/Spielberg movie A.I.) This project used Windows console application or Perl client to solve the puzzle using a brute-force technique, submitting each possible key to the puzzle website. It tested 0.81576% of the total number of keys before the puzzle was solved by a person independent of the project. More information about the project can be found in a Slashdot article.||May 30, 2001||8 days||321/?|
|The GOLEM@Home Project designed and evolved robotic lifeforms via a screensaver application. The screensaver randomly created a population of virtual robots on users' systems and then evolved them (the rule for evolution was survival of the robots who could move the greatest distance over an infinite plain). Every week or so a few of a user's robots moved to someone else's Golem screensaver and a few of someone else's robots moved to the user's screensaver (this feature could be disabled for users worried about security). The virtual robots contained design information that could be used to build actual working robots.||October, 2001||1 year||30,000|