About Distributed Computing.

What are some appropriate applications?

[a1call]

Hi,

I have always been interested in distributed computing. I am starting this thread as a venue for suggesting some problems that can be programmed to be solved using distributed computing.
I think the first application was SETI@home and then it was used to find the largest known prime number. Then there was Google's bend@home to generate all possible ways to bend proteins. Also I think some SE is using it to index the deep web.

Do you know of any other applications that have been used?

Do you have any suggestions as to what problems are ideal for being solved using distributed computing?

Thanks in advance.

[physics]

Jeesh I thought it would be easy to think of something but not everything distributes easily. Will keep thinking about this ;)

[anax]

The SETI@Home project is now part of a group of distributed computing projects that are all run by a system called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). Anyone with a good project can develop it under the BOINC system, which allows volunteers to sign up for one or more projects at a time. (Maybe that's what you're thinking about doing.)

The kinds of things that seem to work are a relatively small group of computationally-intensive problems. Another way to say it is, humans are still best at solving the most interesting problems, and computer power (even huge amounts) can only do so much. But that may be because we haven't thought of enough interesting projects.

[mfewtrell]

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