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SETI@Home is the most popular project, measured by number of participants, but it was actually the third large-scale, public domain, distributed computing project. A lot of its functionality and design is based on the second project, distributed.net, which in turn is based on some design ideas from the first project, GIMPS.

SETI@Home has definitely done a lot to popularize distributed computing, and has influenced many later projects, including protein folding projects like Distributed Folding and Folding@Home.

To see what other projects are out there, take a look at my site about distributed computing projects. And click on the links to past years (on my main index page) to see just how fast this field of science is growing.

Kirk

P.S. Somebody please /. my site so I don't have to keep plugging it in these SETI@home discussions :-)

Or maybe Distributed Folding - they got clients for *a lot* of platforms - even your PS2 (!), though it is really slow :(

I would suggest Distributed Folding instead. At least they got good clients and clients for more than just Windows ;)

Have you taken a look at DistribFold? I mean, these things and SETI@home are cool, but folding proteins actually helps people now.

I donate money, when I can, and I've got permission to use the lab for Distributed Folding. When I finish my generals, I will be focusing on a biology major. Is that enough whining for today?

Distributed Folding!

If you've got 256M+ RAM it's twice as fast, and their programmers actually answer mails and post replies on the forum.

You forgot The Distributed Folding Project. No, it's not the same as F@H ;)

Maybe you should do a little research before spouting off about how there are no useful distributed computing projects out there.

Sorry, brain no workie this morning.

go here instead

AIDS:
FightAids@Home

Cancer:
United Devices
Find-a-Drug
Distributed Folding
Parabon Computation

Bioterrorism Antodotes:
Find-a-Drug
Drug Design Optimization Lab

Other Diseases:
Folding@Home
Genome@Home
Community TSC

Every other distributed computing project that's currently available for you to participate in:
Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects - Active Projects

Kirk
Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects

You should check out Distributed Folding. Their cool client (it draws color ASCII graphics!) is available for lots of platforms.

Just remember to check the settings after you join. When you install the UD client, you give them the right to run whatever project they want, unless you change it in the settings!

If you want to support a project where the privacy of the participants are taken seriously, you should take a look at Distributed Folding. This is not the same as the Folding@Home project, but it is doing something similar.

Unlike UD, there are clients for a lot of platforms and they are going to add more soon.

Important: Be sure to read the readme for the client! You'll regret it if you don't.

I'm not in the seti or d.net competitions anymore because I'd rather spend my cycles on Distributed Folding, or a cure for cancer.

Personally I prefer medical/science projects like the Distributed Folding Project.

They have a really nice and stable client and it is available for a lot of platforms. They are working on adding support for even more platforms - among them, support for the PS/2 Linux kit :)

In regards to performance, the Linux ICC client is a bit faster than the Windows client. This is also one of the few projects where the Intel P4 is actually doing pretty well (In the GIMPS project, the P4 is much faster than any Athlons). For most project, the Athlon is the best choice, in this project, the Athlon doesn't have any big advantage.

Personally I prefer medical/science projects like the Distributed Folding Project.

They have a really nice and stable client and it is available for a lot of platforms. They are working on adding support for even more platforms - among them, support for the PS/2 Linux kit :)

In regards to performance, the Linux ICC client is a bit faster than the Windows client. This is also one of the few projects where the Intel P4 is actually doing pretty well (In the GIMPS project, the P4 is much faster than any Athlons). For most project, the Athlon is the best choice, in this project, the Athlon doesn't have any big advantage.

Another interesting distributed computing project is the Distributed Folding Project. The project uses its computing resources to predict the shape of proteins after they "fold." Since this is the shape they actually are in while inside living organisms, being able to quickly and easily determine their shape could have major ramifications for medical research. Additional infromation about the science behind the project can be found on this page.

It is possible to run more than one client on on PC at the same time. What would you like to do?

As an example, you can easily run the Distributed Folding client, the F@H client, the Distributed.net client and others together. In fact a lot of people in the DC community run 2 clients, a primary client and a secondary client as backup if the primary client for some reason fails.

It is possible to set the priority of a lot of the clients with ex. a commandline switch or something or in a configuration file. If you want to support two projects, it's a matter of tweaking the priority to make each client get ~50% CPU time. You would help more if you bought another box and put a client on each, though ;)

Regarding the "master program" - I know a person who is in fact working on exactly such a piece of software. Some of the clients already kinda have that feature - the Distribute.Net client have 2 projects running, the UD client also have had 2 projects running and I know that Stanford are working on a client that combines F@H and G@H.

In regards to fighting cancer, I believe you are thinking about UD. I personally don't like the way that project is managed. When you install the client, you give them the right to automatically update the client whenever they choose to do so and unless you configure it to do differently, it will also work on other projects besides the cancer project. That is why I currently prefer the Distributed Folding Project - it's a great project (good medical science) and they care a lot about users privacy and security.

A similar project is the Distributed Folding Project. It is great science too (similar to the F@H project) and it has clients for many more platforms than the F@H project.

Furthermore, the client make great color ascii graphics - you can't beat that :D

Saying that somebody sucks because they prefer Seti instead of F@H is lame IMHO. Far from everyone can run the F@H client simply because of their configuration. The F@H client more or less needs an "always on" internet connection, you can run it on a modem connection, but I personally wouldn't. In that case I would be run a different project, maybe the G@H project (the sister project to F@H), more info can be found on the Team Primordial Soup website.

It also depends on what kind of OS you are using. The F@H project has clients for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Yes, that is what most people uses, but it still leaves out a lot of people. Another project, similar to the F@H project is the Distributed Folding Project. It has clients for a lot of platforms and the science is good. You can find more info and a lot of links on the Ars Technica Team Stir Fry website which is the team I'm crunching for.

I personally prefer projects like F@H and Distributed Folding because they potentially could lead to the discovery of new drugs for cancer and other terrible diseases which we currently have no cure for.

A fancy OpenGL version of the screensaver is available for Windows and the coolest ASCII art screensaver ever is available for every other platform you could shake a stick at... Actually, just:

• Linux 2.x and higher (Redhat 6.2) (gcc)
• Linux 2.x and higher (Redhat 7.1) (Intel compiler)
• FreeBSD 4.5 and higher (Intel CPU)
• IRIX 6.x (64-bit)
• Solaris 2.8 and higher (64-bit)
• Macintosh PowerPC-Linux 2.x
• Macintosh PowerPC Darwin/OSX
• Compaq-Alpha-Tru64