Slashdot Mirror
World Wide Cluster
gwjc writes: "There is a pretty good Ian Foster article on Web-based computing clusters at the Nature site. The usual SETI@home, condor, and entropia mentions as well as a few that were news to me such as "Compute against Cancer" and "Fight Aids At Home" with links. I wonder how I go about declaring."
Being a long time distributed computing advocate, I've used (and crunched many blocks for) GIMPS, distributed.net, Seti@Home, Folding@Home, and United Devices. I'm currently using all my spare cycles for United Devices. Why? Well here's a brief explanation/analysis of the projects I've used:
GIMPS - They have a good, clean client, but the critical problem is that the project has no conceivable benefit.
distributed.net - Probably the best client/site out there, and definitely the largest pre-Seti@home project. However, the cracking of encrypted messages has next to no scientific benefit (it is quite easy to calculate the chance per try of cracking any of their ciphertexts). Recently they've been doing some work with OGRs. Finding new OGRs looks like something that at least has a marginal benefit. On a side note, distributed.net has partnered up with United Devices.
Seti@home - It seems like everyone and their mom is running seti@home. However, reportedly seti@home actually has more clock cycles than they need. (they can only get so much radio info per day to analyze)
Folding@Home - Definitely a lesser known project which is being run by some researchers from Stanford, they analyze proteins. The project definitely has scientific merit, however they're experiencing some growing pains due to their recent popularity. Also their client is definitely beta-esque.
United Devices - This is the project that I'm currently contributing to. (so of course I'm bias) I chose them because they're doing something useful (working on cancer stuff with some researchers from the University of Oxford), have a fairly good client, and have a 'rewards' program for their users. (btw, GIMPS and distributed.net users also have the chance of winning a large cash prize) In addition, UD has partnered up with distributed.net, so it looks like UD just might be the commercial corporation to win the Internet-based distributed computing market.