Projects Based on Volunteer Computing
Here is a list of several projects based on distributed computations popular in the Internet.
Einstein@Home is a project created to check Einstein’s hypothesis on the gravity waves, means of distribution of gravity in the Universe. For that purpose, “heavy” space objects, such as neutron stars, black holes and pulsing stars are studied and compiled into a detailed atlas to understand, just how the gravity waves are distributed, if they exist at all, of course. Observations and studies within this project allow better understanding and confirming (or maybe confuting) of the general relativity theory, finding out the movement speed of the gravity waves — whether or not it is light speed, determining physical properties of these hypothetic waves. In addition, starting from 2009, a part of the project’s capacities, and, accordingly, a part of the volunteers’ computations is aimed at finding radio pulsars and other uncommon objects of the Universe.
Gerasim@Home is a Russian volunteer distributed computing project on the BOINC platform. The project started in test mode in February 2008. It is aimed at researching of the heuristic methods of modeling of splitting the parallel flowgraphs. As for the June 23, 2015, 1999 users (890 computers) from 62 countries were involved into the project, providing the performance of 1–5 teraflops.
SZTAKI Desktop Grid is a project organized by Hungarian specialists from SZTAKI — Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet (Scientific and research university of cybernetics and automatization of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). It refers to the field of information theory and helps in studying the numerical system. It is aimed at finding the matrixes of up to 11 degree (that is, 11x11 elements), suitable as the base of numerical systems.
Asteroids@home is a project from the field of astronomy aimed at characterizing physical properties of asteroids (shape, spatial orientation, rotation period) using photometric data; storing the materials for researches in the field of nature and evolution of the asteroids in the Solar system; providing data on spatial orientation, shape and rotation period of the asteroids to determine alterations in their orbit using thermal emission (the Yarkovsky effect).
Cosmology@Home is a volunteer computing project based on the BOINC platform. It was launched by the academic department of Astronomy and Physics of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As for the September 5, 2013, 55 957 users (106 909 computers) from 190 countries were involved into the project, providing the performance of 13, 04 teraflops. The Cosmology@Home project is aimed at comparing theoretical models of the Universe and contemporary astronomical and physical data and searching for the model which would describe our Universe in the best way basing on the results of modeling and observing the vestigial radiation.
Rosetta@Home is a volunteer computing project aimed at solving one of the biggest problems of molecular biology — calculation of the tertiary structure of proteins and their amino acid sequences. The results of recently finished project “Human Genome” revealed amino acids sequences of all the protides in human organism. Researches of this project may also help in projecting new, not yet existent protides. Although this project is mostly oriented at fundamental researches in the field of improving accuracy and surety of proteomics methods, Rosetta@home also helps applied researches in their combat against such diseases as cancer, malaria, Alzheimer disease, malignant anthrax and other genetic and viral diseases.
Folding@Home (F@H, FAH) — is a volunteer computing project for computer modeling of protide molecule folding. Aim of this project is to understand the technique and principles of biochemical process of creation (folding) and destruction (unfolding) of protides. This is required for combating such diseases as Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, diabetes, sclerosis. As a result of the volunteers’ computational help, this project had a lot of simulations, which served as a base for a great many intermediate science works. It is the largest of the distributed volunteer computing projects; the total performance of its systems can be compared with performance of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
DrugDiscovery@Home is a Russian bio-medicine distributed computations project based on the BOINC platform. Its main aim is molecular dynamics, protide folding. Its secondary objective is screening large data bases of biologically active compounds. It is suggested that a part of the aims will be calculated basing on requests of various scientists, which will allow any scientist are scientific group to suggest aim for calculations.
Human Proteome Folding Project has become the first project of WCG. It is a program of the Human Biology Institution on creating a catalog of all the protides present in a human body and studying their functions. It is planned, that WCG will help to calculate the process of creating the new protides basing on the information contained in genes, and afterwards resulting specimens will be compared with 3D images of already known protides contained in a specialized data base.
The FightAIDS@Home project, which is aimed at developing the new medicine against AIDS, has become the second task of WCG. Earlier this project was an independent one, however, it was not very famous and had some considerable flaws in client software and design of its website. To correct the existing flaws and raise the project’s popularity, and also to let the scientific staff concentrate on the research part of the software, in November 2005 the project was relocated to the World Community Grid platform, which by that time was already running and well-functioning.
Just like the above mentioned projects, the Elige project suggests using computational capabilities of distributed network of miners to find new medicine, protides and other chemical compounds helpful for people and similar economically attractive calculations. Cryptocurrency miners use their vast computation capabilities to calculate unique but totally useless information. Our project will turn these capabilities to profit not only for the project participants, bur for the humanity as a whole.
https://medium.com/@elige/projects-based-on-volunteer-computing-6c0d3120a937
