May 7th, 2008
There have been several improvements to their software. This is the first news from this project in some time.
Look in the active projects section for more information on D2OL.
February 27th, 2008
It was announced in December that no new work units will be issued by the Seasonal Attribution Project. As of today however, the project is showing that 3,832 projects are still in progress. New experiments for this project will be done from their parent site, Climateprediction.net.
Look in the active projects section for more information on the Seasonal Attribution Project.
February 27th, 2008
With the new equipment, SETI@Home is now producing 500 times more data. See the article here.
Look in the active projects section for more information on SETI@Home.
February 26th, 2008
Rosetta@Home's new software, called minirosetta, has been developed to make it easier for scientists to design new applications. The earlier software was developed in an older programming language (Fortran), making it less flexible harder to change. A slow transition to this new software will occur soon.
Find discussion on this subject in this forum thread.
Look in the active projects section for more information on Rosetta@home.
February 25th, 2008
After years of a manual process in which users must submit results via e-mail, evolution@home can be run with the automatic (no need to e-mail results) BOINC computing platform. The old software program was attached to BOINC using a wrapper application developed by the BOINC team at Berkeley.
Note that the BOINC application is not yet available for download on their site.
Look in the active projects section for more information on evolution@home.
January 6th, 2008
The Chinese project Pi Segment had found the 2,000,000,000,000,000th bit (in binary) of Pi. The value of the bit 0. Find more details here.
November 30th, 2007
The World Community Grid has started a new project called Help Conquer Cancer. This project, like many others, is studying the shapes of folded proteins. However, Help Conquer Cancer is not using algorithms to predict the structures.
Look in the active projects section for more information on this new project.
November 14th, 2007
APS@Home is a new Environmental Science project.
Look in the active projects section for more information on APS@Home.
November 1st, 2007
The Lattice project has improved its software to allow users to pick which applications they want to run.
Look in the active projects section for more information on The Lattice Project.
September 30th, 2007
Another new project has been launched for with World Community Grid.
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
September 20th, 2007
A new project has been launched for with World Community Grid.
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
August 10th, 2007
After 3,800 years of computing time from 280,000 different computers, the Genome Comparison Project has come to a successful conclusion. Researchers are now going to examine the data for their own testing and make it available to other researchers. More information on the finished project will soon be available at The Genome Comparison Project and World Community Grid's Genome Comparison Project Results site.
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
July 29th, 2007
Another new BOINC based project is being developed. This one is looking for clean methods of hydrogen production. A brief description is in the future projects section.
July 24th, 2007
A new BOINC based project is being developed that will study properties of the universe. A brief description is in the future projects section.
June 25th, 2007
The first phase of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project in which cross docking simulations where done for over 150 proteins is now coming to a close. These results will now be analyzed to see if they will be of use in the subsequent stages of the experiment. The next stage will be done outside of World Community Grid. Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy is then scheduled to come back to World Community Grid with an extended data set.
More information here - post 1 and post 2.
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
May 22nd, 2007
The particle accelerator at CERN will generate more than 15 petabytes of data per year. Read more about it in this first article from HPC Wire and this second article from Grid Today.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is the flagship project of CERN, has the volunteer computing project LHC@Home associated with it.
May 16th, 2007
The cancer research project Grid.org has announced its closure. Speculation on the reasons for its closure can be found in this article.
May 2nd, 2007
Einstein@Home has posted the results from their analysis of the S3 data set. After removing "fake signal bands" and eight other candidates that were ruled out after further analysis, it was concluded that there were no pulsar signals in the S3 data.
Look in the active projects section for more information on Einstein@Home.
April 14th, 2007
IBM's World Community Grid is planning a new cancer project expected to be released by June of this year. There are few details available but, quoting from a World Community Grid newsletter, it will help to find new methods "to accelerate the crystallization process used in studying cancer protein structure using X-ray Crystallography."
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
April 5th, 2007
A newsletter has been sent out to World Community Grid participants stating that, in just nine months, the Help Defeat Cancer project has come to a successful conclusion. Researchers are planning on using the results of the project to help make Tissue Microarray Technology an important tool used in the early detection of cancer. Updates involving the use of this technology will be posted on the research pages of the World Community Grid's Website.
Look in the active projects section for more information on World Community Grid.
March 31st, 2007
The Folding@Home team at Stanford University has made great strides forward in increasing the popularity and availability of computing power through the use of the popular Playstation gaming console. The Stanford team has found that PS3 users are discovering the project through the use of the PS3, then also installing the program on their PCs.
Other article of interest on the PS3 Folding@Home cilent include:
Look in the active projects section for more information on Folding@Home.
March 17th, 2007
Predictor@Home, a BOINC-based project, is asking its users to upgrade their BOINC clients to version 5.4 or newer.
Look in the active projects section for more information on Predictor@Home..
February 25th, 2007
A SETI@Home user's laptop was recently stolen. The owner of the laptop was able to lead the police to the computer's location. Find out how by reading this article at Yahoo News link removed because story has been deleted from Yahoo's news server (3-28-07).
Moral of the story? Never mess with a geek's computer.
Look in the active projects section for more information on SETI@Home.
February 25th, 2007
The 3D animation rendering project BURP (Big and Ugly Rendering Project) is now transitioning to the Alpha stage. This forum post describes it as BURP changing "from being completely experimental to being a tool, although it still remains in-development." The server side of the project is expected to be more stable in the Alpha stage but there are still several problems on the client-side including some that may disrupt other BOINC projects that if you have others running. The forum post has suggestions for temporary fixes for these problems.
Look in the future projects section for more information on BURP.
February 11th, 2007
Predictor@Home has begun dispatching new work units for the first time since September 2006.
Look in the active projects section for more information.
February 4th, 2007
The new 5.8.8 BOINC client is causing problems with the Docking@Home program's "Homogeneous Redundancy rules." Docking@Home is also asking you not to use the 5.8.8 Linux client because it is also causing problems. The Linux client has not been officially released.
Look in the future projects section for more information.
February 4th, 2007
The software development team at the University of California, Berkeley has released the next version of its BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software. The Linux client is not yet finished, but the rest are available for download.
Some improvements include:
February 4th, 2007
SIMAP appears to be stable and is now being moved from the future projects page to the active projects page.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 28th, 2007
The BBC ran a project in conjunction with climateprediction.net last year. Through the massive reach of BBC's empire, they signed up 250,000 participants. The results are in and there is an multimedia site displaying them here.
January 21st, 2007
The BBC had developed a game in which you can play the role of a European leader. Throughout the game, you must make difficult decisions to mitigate climate change while remaining a popular as a leader.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 21st, 2007
Einstein@Home has finished sending out work units for its first search of the LIGO S5 data. Soon, they will be starting a hierarchical search which is a more sensitive type of search. Meanwhile, data units will be sent out from the first S5 search from a larger range of spin-down ages than was previously done. Einstein@Home hopes to have all technical problems related to this transition solved soon.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 21st, 2007
By comparing three models of a non-industrial earth to an earth that has today's conditions, the Seasonal Attribution project has concluded that human induced climate change clearly played a part in the Autumn 2000 floods in the UK. Now they are extending the project to compare today's earth to a fourth non-industrial earth, the Japanese MIROC 3.2 model.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 14th, 2007
The LHC@Home project, which has been down since last September, is wrapping up its installation of a new server at Queen Mary College. There are some pictures here.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 14th, 2007
The climate simulation program, ClimatePrediction.net, has completed simulation for 20 million model years.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 14th, 2007
Update - 3/11/08 - This page no longer exists.
A MySpace page has been created to inform other people on MySpace of the benefits of Volunteer Computing with BOINC. The page contains information on some of the more popular BOINC projects and the founder has also created a team called BOINC Myspacers. Graphs on the page are showing how the team is quickly growing in popularity.
Look in the VC Initiatives section for more info.
January 7th, 2007
The Einstein@Home project, which searches for spinning neutron stars, has been having continuing fileserver problems for more than a week now. They have been working to solve the problem. The latest update is that they have put a temporary server in place to help stabalize the situation.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
January 1st, 2007
IBM's World Community Grid is now up to five concurrent projects with its launch of Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy. Full information is provided in the active projects section under the World Community Grid listing.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
December 30th, 2006
In an effort to effort to include every distributed computing project on this website, dsitributed.net has been added.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
December 10th, 2006
A new project has been announced that allows users to buy or sell cpu resources. This provides a good illustration of the difference between the broader topic of Distributed Computing and Volunteer Computing. Distributed Computing would include a project like this. Volunteers would not participate in this, since it is for pay-duh! Besides, the author takes a rip at volunteers by refferencing this Slashdot Posting on his technical explanation page. Gee, us dumb volunteers all thought electricity fell from the sky!
December 10th, 2006
The new SETI@Home home page is reporting that users can transfer credit from the old SETI@Home project to the new project. Users do not need their old password.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
December 10th, 2006
Have you grown tired of your BOINC manager's look? You can now customize it with a new skin. The BOINC team has published deatailed instructions here link removed because page is gone 3-29-2007. Check out two examples (example 1 and example 2) made by Olaf Bornack of Team BOINC@Halle/Saale.
December 10th, 2006
Development of the internet analysis project DEPSPID is humming right along. A summary of the progress and an overview of the technical aspects of the project are located in this forum post.
Look in the future projects section for more information.
December 7th, 2006
A new application written just for Linux users lets you monitor your BOINC jobs from a terminal in a "tail-like" way. This method works without an x-server since there is no need for graphics inside a terminal.
December 6th, 2006
BOINC has rolled out a new help service offering free phone help for BOINC and Volunteer Computing. The help system is staffed by volunteers and it uses Skype software. It is available in several different languages. To use the voice system, you need a computer with a microphone and speakers or a headset. If you cannot use the voice system, you can use a text-based chat.
December 6th, 2006
Proteins@Home has updated their software and is no longer requiring a password for participation. Thus beginith the Beta phase.
Look in the future projects section for more information.
December 3rd, 2006
The news has been delayed because of the two improvements that went online tonight are as follows:
November 24th, 2006
The University of Texas at Austin's EON project has implimented a fix on their sever which will help to reduce downtime. This project calculates the "long time scale simulation of solids." In these BOINCerific days, it is worth noting that this project is one of the few left that does not use BOINC as a platform.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 23rd, 2006
Rosetta@Home has updated to version 5.40 and it has started simulation of the protein amyloid fibrils. Here is the forum thread related to this topic.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 23rd, 2006
BURP, the Big Ugly Rendering Project, has reported a mild security breach. Some work units that were sent out could create an empty folder that resides outside of the BOINC folder. Participants are advised to go to this URI for more information if they are affected.
Look in the future projects section for more information.
November 20th, 2006
The DepSpid project is creating its own distributed web crawler. Web crawlers are the little automated soldiers that gather the information used by search engines.
Look in the future projects section for more information.
November 19th, 2006
IBM's World Community grid is starting its fourth simultaneous project - The Genome Comparison Project which will run alongside Help Defeat Cancer, Human Proteome Folding Phase two, and FightAIDS@Home.
As scientists study genes and discover new information, they put it into one of many different databases. As more information is discovered, the old information is sometimes not updated properly. Over time, this has resulted in inaccurate information for many gene sequences. This project is attempting to "perform, for the first time, a complete pairwise comparison between all predicted protein sequences" to improve the accuracy of the existing information. The project will use an open and available algorithm and the results will be available for all to see.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 12th, 2006
Stephen Brooks's project, Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator Design, is temporarily offline for database maintenance. This is a physics project which is simulating functions of the Neutrino Factory - a proposed particle accelerator slated to be built in 2015 at a cost of a mere $1.9 billion.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 12th, 2006
The SETI@home Toolbar is a plug-in for your web browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer) that connects to SETI@Home and other SETI@home users. Among other things, the toolbar contains useful links to information about the SETI project, lets you listen to the online University of California radio station, and gives you the ability to chat with other alien searchers who have the SETI toolbar.
The Boinctray is a Linux only program that resides in your system tray and displays the progress of the BOINC computations running on your computer. It may only be available in Linux, but I don't know of any other operating systems worth porting it to anyway, do you? I didn't think so!
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 11th, 2006
Stanford is at it again. They are now releasing an SMP client for beta testing. SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) is a computer architecture in which two or more identical processors share the main memory. Most multiprocessor PCs sold today use SMP technology. There is a Wikipedia about SMP here. More info relating to the Stanford SMP project can be found in this Folding@Home forum thread.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 11th, 2006
The DIMES project which is using volunteer computing to study the "structure and topology" of the Internet, has redesigned their website. It has a more modern look and they have made their code more future-proof by using XHTML instead of outdated HTML. Check it out here.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
November 11th, 2006
The Einstein@Home project is having a party for it's participants. I wonder if they bought enough food for all 150,000 people that participate in the project? Enjoy some Wiener Schnitzel while you are there too because it is being held just outside of Berlin, Germany.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
October 29th, 2006
The folks at Stanford are enabling to run Folding@Home with multi-GPU machines. The GPU client has been reported to run 20 to 30 times faster with one GPU. With multiple GPU it could be, well you can do the math.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
October 29th, 2006
Rosetta@Home's new software version, 5.34, will allow them to test energy functions more accurately and "to be more flexible with the bond lengths and angles in the proteins."
Look in the active projects section for more info.
October 29th, 2006
BURP (Big Ugly Rendering Project) is reporting that they are coming up first for search results in Google and Yahoo. Rumors have been circulating that BURP may be the next target for a billion dollar tech buyout based on their monopoly of this hot keyword. BURP ringtones are coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you.
Look in the future projects section for more info about BURP.
October 22nd, 2006
A French university is creating a protein folding research project using the BOINC platform. It is in the early stages of development and is currently only available for the Windows operating system.
Look in the future projects section for more info about Proteins@Home.
October 15th, 2006
Folding@Home's experimental use of a PC's graphics processing card to increase computational speed has been showing great promise lately. This article looks at this new concept from many angles including power consumption, assignment of points, and real world increases in speed.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
October 15th, 2006
The first interview is about a project called SETI@home that performs a constant alien signal search. The second and third interviews are at Quantum Monte Carlo at Home. Oh, I forgot one minor detail. The QMC interviews are in German.
Look in the active projects section for more info about SETI@home.
Look in the future projects section for more info about Quantum Monte Carlo at Home.
October 15th, 2006
Inevitably some projects will be managed better than others. Project Neron wants to provide you with information regarding the efficiency of volunteer computing efforts based on several criteria:
If this project produces reliable data when when it comes out of its development phase, it will be a good resource for deciding where to apply your computer's energy.
Look in the future projects section for more info.
October 15th, 2006
SIMAP has blown through its work and no time and will now only be doing small computational units as they come available. This project was working on a "protein sequence comparison." Maybe this project shouldn't be in the "future" section anymore!
Look in the future projects section for more info.
October 15th, 2006
Compare the old and the new here.
Look in the active projects section for more info about Evolution@Home.
October 11th, 2006
Nanorex has released a beta version of its nano-machine modeling software for public testing. The new program, called NanoHive@Home, is open-source and runs on the BOINC Platform.
Look in the future projects section for more info.
October 2nd, 2006
Rosetta@Home is displaying several colorful examples comparing the results of calculated protein shapes with those of real proteins on this page. Since the objective of this project is to accurately predict shapes of proteins, these results are very important.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
October 2nd, 2006
Longtime protein folding project Folding@Home is releasing an experimental client that utilizes the graphics processing capabilities of a PC in addition to using the CPU. This combination can achieve speeds 20 to 30 times faster than now possible. Downloads of the beta client are available if you meet the requirements.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
September 19th, 2006
The environmental research project called Seasonal Attribution is nearing its initial goal of completing 2000 work units, after which it will eventually shutdown. There is a forum post detailing this here. To summarize some of the points, only results completed completed before October 31st, 2006 will be included in the first paper on attribution of the UK Autumn 2000 floods. Any results returned after October 31st, 2006 may be included in papers written later.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
September 19th, 2006
On August 14th, the Einstein@Home project released new versions of its software for Linux and Windows that will search for those pesky spinning neutron stars faster.
Look in the active projects section for more info.
September 19th, 2006
DIMES has released a new version of its Java based client. This version allows users to "control multiple agents through the web."
Look in the active projects section for more info.
September 19th, 2006
Predictor@Home is off line while they work on new methods of protein structure prediction. In the meantime, they are suggesting that you work on other BOINC projects.
September 14th, 2006
Nano-Hive's distributed computing software will provide the processing power needed for Nanorex's CAD software. Nanorex's web page has extensive information and great animated pictures. Also, check out this Google Video.
Look in the future projects section for more info.
September 11th, 2006
Sprechen Sie Deutsch? A new BOINC-based project has been developed called Spinhenge@home. The research behind this pursuit is based in Germany. Although the term can be used loosely, Nanotechnology is the ability to control matter at the atomic level.
Look in the future projects section for more info.
August 23rd, 2006
Sony has collaborated with Stanford University to release a new, faster Folding@Home client. This new software, called Cure@PS3, is made specifically for the PS3 with better graphics that can be viewed here. Folding@Home's project coordinators are hopeful that this new client will provide more speed and better graphics for the project.
August 17th, 2006
The Climateprediction.net team has created videos and pdf files detailing certain aspects of the project. These include general topics such as "answering participants questions" to more technical areas such as "exploring feedbacks in an ensemble of climate models".
You'll need Windows media player to be able to watch the videos of the presentation.
August 14th, 2006
This had previously been reported on June 15th, however this article goes into more detail about the multi-beam receiver. It talks about how it will allow SETI@Home to record more data and do it faster and more accurately than before.
July 26th, 2006
IBM's World Community Grid has started a new cancer fighting project. Unlike most of the other bioscience projects, Help Defeat Cancer is not simulating pharmaceuticals or protein folding. This new project is comparing Tissue Microarrays of different types of cancer. Comparing the tissues makes it possible for researchers to determine the specific type and stage of cancer. Read more in the active projects section here.
June 23rd, 2006
World Community Grid's Human Proteome Folding project has proceeded to Phase 2 of it's protein folding simulation project. The two main objectives of the stage are to investigate higher resolution protein structures and improve the Rosetta software.
June 15th, 2006
The University of California Berkeley's alien signal searching project, listed in the active projects scection of this website here, installed a new multi-beam data recorder. In a nutshell, this recorder is faster so it can take in data from larger areas of the sky and absorb more sensitive readings. The SETI@home group has posted a details page with their expansion plans including an explanation of this new multi-beam data recorder.
June 4th, 2006
March 31st, 2007 - Link is broken, therefore it has been removed.
This is a nice article about the person who developed the Rosetta@Home program. It is a good example of the inspiration driving the software authors and the volunteers who run the programs.
Rosetta@Home can be found in the active projects listing here.
May 17th, 2006
To turn off or not to turn off, that is the question. BOINC has published a nice little table comparing the power usage and cost per month of using your computer with BOINC and without BOINC. They have also put pencil to paper and figured how much electricity it would consume to leave a PC turned off all of the time. That one sure is a surprise.
Food for thought - is the extra CO2 output worth leaving your PC on if you are running the Seasonal Attribution or Climateprediction.net?
May 3th, 2006
This new climate simulation project has been spawned from Climateprediction.net. Seasonal Attribution will run climate simulations comparing models that include human-induced climate change with models that do not include human-induced climate change. The project will then compare the results from these simulations to see what affect human-induced climate change may have on extreme weather risk.
Find more info on the project in the active projects section here.
April 13th, 2006
The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases together with The Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL) has started to study the avian influenza. Yes, the scary flu that you have heard so much about on TV and the Internet.
The software will look at proteins identified from the avian flu and simulate the binding of drug molecules with them to identify possible combinations that could lead to potential drug candidates. The best results from this process will then be sent to facilities affiliated with The Rothberg Institute, including Harvard, Yale, and Fox Chase Cancer Center.
March 1st, 2006
The project leader at Predictor@Home has written an in-depth article covering the progress of his project. The piece also talks about Volunteer Computing, Computational Chemistry in general, and how Folding@Home relates to other distributed computing projects.
March 2006
The relatively ancient SETI@home project (since May of 1999) is conducting its first annual fundraiser. They are asking for donations to help with expenses such as staff salaries, server hardware, network bandwidth, and other expenses. Other expenses include the following:
Really though, buy yourself one less jelly doughnut and donate the money to this great project. They brought us BOINC after all.
February 14th, 2006
The BBC News ran a front page story on Climate Prediction.net which talked about how their next climate model will have dynamic oceans. Compared to the older models, these newer versions will produce more realistic results that will take into account the exchange of heat and gases between the oceans and the atmosphere.
There is more on the project here in their Science and Nature section.
January 31st, 2006
The Distributed Hardware Evolution project's home page is displaying a message that simply says DHEP has closed. There is no other information. A logical conclusion is that their hardware evolved to the point that it got smarter than the people running it and it ate them alive. Then the hardware wrote that message on the home page. You should probably lock your doors tonight.
January 22nd, 2006
Ars Technica has written this article about the closure of Find-a-Drug and the transitioning of the SETI@home Classic to the BOINC platform. Ars also takes a moment to brag about the performance of their teams in these two projects with the intimidating names of Team Lamb Chop and Team Hard Cider.
September 2005
Citing great success in there project, Find-a-Drug has run out of "worth wile protein queries". They do not think they will be able to find any partners willing to fund them to target proteins that are not as likely to yield results. The project will cease on December 16th, 2005.
*The organization that created this website, Open Web Design, LLC, assumes no liability for the programs mentioned on this website. Do not install any of these programs without reading and understanding the information provided by each project's website.
