DClient
Category: Cryptography
Completion Date: 11/08/02
Project Duration: 3 months
Number of Units Completed: 2.7 billion blocks
Number of Participants: unknown
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DClient was a distributed, brute-force attempt to find the secret "backdoor"
password for Tivo's version 3.2
software. This password would allow a Tivo device owner to enable hidden
features in the software. The project ended before a key was found. The project generated about 2.7 billion blocks of keys using
about 85 CPU years.
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Category: Mathematics
Completion Date: November, 2002
Project Duration: 4 months
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: unkown
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The smallest remaining Sierpinski
problem candidate k=4847 project searched for prime numbers of the form 4847.
2n+1 forn > 1,000,000 (n <= 1,000,000 had already been checked).
The project was coordinated by Payam Samidoost, an active researcher of Fermat numbers. It
used George Woltman's PRP software.
The project was merged with the Seventeen or
Bust project in November, 2002.
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ECCp-109
Category: Cryptography
Completion Date: 10/15/02
Project Duration: 6 months
Number of Units Completed: 68,228,567
Number of Participants: unknown
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The ECCp-109 Challenge was a distributed
effort to solve Certicom's ECCp-109 challenge
and set "a new world record in characteristic p elliptic curve discrete log
computation." The project won Certicom's $10,000 (US) prize: each of the
two people who found the winning curve received $1,000 (US) and the remaining
$8,000 (US) Free Software Foundation.
After 68,228,567 total distinguished points were found, the solution was
discovered to be k=281183840311601949668207954530684.
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Décrypthon Téléthon 2001
Category: Life Sciences
Completion Date:05/02/02
Project Duration: 2 months
Number of Units Completed: 550,000 proteins
Number of Participants: 75,000
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Décrypthon, by the French organization "Téléthon 2001", decrypted
proteomes to fight against neuromuscular and other diseases. It compared
and classified about 550,000 proteins, and made the results available in a
free, public database on September 16, 2002. The database website is available in
English. The project began in March, 2002.
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Qoopy
Category: Puzzles/Games
Completion Date: 02/23/02
Project Duration: 6 months
Number of Units Completed:2,228,343 games played
Number of Participants: 1,700
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Qoopy uses a single infrastructure to support many kinds of client applications (similar to the
Parabon Computation project). The
site is hosted by the University of Dortmund in Germany.
Qoopy's first project,
EvoChess,
evolved chess-playing programs. Each user's client generated some programs.
The more successful programs survives and combines with other users' chess
programs to speed up the evolutionary process. Users could play against the
evolved chess programs and see information about the best evolved programs in
the stats pages.
The last version of the project client only allowed programs which looked
ahead 5-10 moves to survive. In the end, "the first evolution converged
quite fast. This was due to the fact that the individuals faced an immovable
enemy (the minimax algorithm)."
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United Devices
Category: Life Sciences
Completion Date: 02/14/02
Project Duration: 4 weeks
Number of Units Completed: 2,867,618 results
Number of Participants/Computers: unknown
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United Devices' first completed project was a
bioinformatics research project for the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
The project, called HMMER,used the Hidden Markov Modeling technique to compare
known DNA sequences (amino acids) against the data from the Human Genome
Project to find similar sequences.
United Devices' second completed project searched for potential drugs to fight the toxic
properties of anthrax so that the disease can be treated in humans in its
advanced stages. Any likely drug candidates from the project will be
given to the U.S. government and other U.S.-friendly governments for
further development into actual drugs. This project began on January 22,
2002 and the screening phase concluded successfully on February 14, 2002.
From a pool of 3.57 billion molecules it found over 300,000 drug candidates.
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Safermarkets
Category: Financial
Completion Date: 01/18/02
Project Duration: 9 months
Number of Units Completed: 970,885 tasks completed
Number of Participants: 9,335 computers
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SaferMarkets project, which ran on the entropia platform, studied the causes
of stock market volatility.
According to a Business Week article, the goal of the project was to find a formula that can,
"predict the likelihood, degree, and duration of volatility in the Nasdaq and S&P
indexes and in five currency exchanges where the U.S. dollar is half the
equation. First using Bayesian statistics regarding human behavior to create
a random fictional history of volatility, then fine tuning the formula against
real, historical data. Eventually the project would use the formula to
predict the volatility of individual equities. The project coordinators will
analyze all of the data generated by the project and will publish its final
results in economical journals and make the results available to the public
for free to help people improve their finances through better planning tools."
Note:The Safer Markets URL is redirected to entropia's home page, and the
SaferMarkets was taken offline immediately when the project concluded.
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DataSynapse
Category: Internet
Completion Date: 12/17/01
Project Duration: 12 months
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants/Computers: 10,000+
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DataSynapse built a better P2P web searcher by joining with the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Lehigh University to develop an
approach called Hierarchical Distributed Dynamic Indexing (HDDI TM).
Participants were entered into prize sweepstakes drawings. The project was
designed only for users with broadband Internet connections and was only
available for the Windows platform.
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Distributed Particle Accelerator Design
Category: Life Sciences
Completion Date: September, 2001
Project Duration: 14 months
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants/Computers: unknown
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Popular Power searched for a more effective influenza vaccine. The company went out of
business on March 17, 2001, but the founders continued the influenza vaccine project
until September, 2001. The client used Java for task implementation to
provide a secure "sandbox" area within which its customers could run their own
code without being able to acces the rest of your system (the way a browser
provides a secure area for a Java applet).
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Golem@home
Category: Science
Completion Date: october, 2001
Project Duration: 1 year
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants/Computers: 30,000
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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.
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Category: Cryptography
Completion Date: 05/30/01
Project Duration: 8 days
Number of Units Completed:0.81576% of total
Number of Participants: 321
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The perceive.net cloudmakers project attempted to solve a puzzle called RUR-14.
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.
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Category: Science
Completion Date: mid 1998
Project Duration: unknown
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: unknown
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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.
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Category: Mathematics
Completion Date: May, 1999
Project Duration: 2.5 years
Number of Units Completed: 1,026 trillion nodes+
Number of Participants: unknown
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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.
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Category: Mathematics
Completion Date: July, 1999
Project Duration: unknown
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: unknown
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Swiss Knife Software had a screen saver application which tried to solve the
Eternity puzzle.
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PiHex
Category:
Completion Date: 09/11/00
Project Duration: 2 years
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: 1246
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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.
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Internet Animation '99
Category: Miscellaneous
Completion Date: August, 1999
Project Duration: 2 years
Number of Units Completed: not applicable
Number of Participants: unknown
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The Internet Animation '99"was an experimental project aimed to discover how a computer 3D
animationcould 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.
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Category: Mathematics
Completion Date: 04/04/00
Project Duration: 4 months
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: 1300
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The ECC2K-108 project solved Certicom's ECC2k-108 Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm challenge.
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Process Tree
Category: Internet
Completion Date: May, 2001
Project Duration: 4 months
Number of Units Completed: unknown
Number of Participants: unknown
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ProcessTree Network
TM
For-pay Internet distributed processing.
ProcessTree Network was the first project to
offer pay for providers' spare CPU cycles. Its first (and last) paid project
began the week of January 8, 2001. Selected users in certain locations
with a Win32 platform and a 128 Kbit/sec or faster, permanent Internet
connection could join the project. The payout was $US12.50 per month and
location (that amount was divided among the systems active in each location
during the month). The project's parent company, Distributed Science,
went out of business on May 24, 2001 due to a lack of funding, and the project
shut down on that date.
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Category: Science
Completion Date: May, 2001
Project Duration: 1 year
Number of Units Completed: > 100 million
Number of Participants: unknown
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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.
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XPulsar@home
Category: Science
Completion Date: 03/31/01
Project Duration: 1 year
Number of Units Completed: 1.2 million CPU hours
Number of Participants: 8432
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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-rayphotons in X-ray pulsars.
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