P2P - Research

Attention:
This page contains information found on research-oriented projects led by companies and/or research communities.

Compute Against Cancer (CAC) By: Parabon Computation
To help speed the fight against cancer, Parabon is donating computing resources to major research centers and universities, including:

Cancer Treatment Research Foundation (CTRF)
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
West Virginia University
University of Maryland

Cancer Research By: University of Oxford and United Devices

The National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, England in partnership with United Devices search for cancer-fighting drugs using a peer-to-peer platform similiar to that of HMMER

Casino-21 By: University of Oxford

Casino-21 is a scientific experiment in large-scale Monte Carlo simulation of the climate of the 20th and 21st centuries. In brief, users install a unique, state-of-the art climate model on your home PC and keep it running, possibly for a year or more. You'll still be able to use the PC as normal: just like the SETI@home project the model will run as a kind of screensaver as long as your PC is switched on and not in use.

EduCommons By: Utah State University

"The EduCommons Project is an interdisciplinary approach to using technology to help people learn, bringing together the power of five revolutionary ideas from several academic areas:

a fundamentally constructivist learning philosophy
a learning objects-based instructional design model (with IEEE 1484.12 conforming educational resource metadata)
a peer-to-peer network architecture
a collaborative filtering system that can recommend both educational resources and people
an open source / open content approach to intellectual property.

The EduCommons Project, directed by David Wiley, is currently under development at Utah State University."
(As found at http://www.educommons.org)

FightAIDS@Home By: Entropia, The Scripps Research Institute

Participants: Entropia, Inc., the Olson laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Entropia's FightAIDS@Home project attempts to model the evolution of drug resistance and designs the drugs necessary to fight AIDS. Download client that talks to Entropia's network (see GIMPS for similar platform)

Folding@Home By: Pande Group, Stanford University

Another volunteer project that uses a screensaver or client application based on the Mithral CS-SDK to simulate protein folding in an effort to better understand how proteins self-assemble or fold. To study how this happens, requires extremely intensive computations, since proteins fold no slower than a 10 microseconds (10^-6 seconds), but we can only routinely simulate nanoseconds (10^-9 seconds). These computations can be performed with thousands of processors in a distributed environment.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) By: Entropia

A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, etc. There are only 38 known Mersenne primes. GIMPS was formed in Jan. 1996 to discover new Mersenne primes. GIMPS has so far found the 4 highest known Mersenne primes.

You download the program and it talks to Entropia's PrimeNet, a central server on the Internet, to get work to do and report results.
Program uses HTTP and may need some configuration if firewalls are in place.
Only a few hundred bytes are sent (every week or two).
No continuous Internet connection required.
PrimeNet is a virtual machine application of the Entropia Network, with operations, end-user technical support and CPU time accounting provided by Entropia.
On 10 February 2000: current sustained throughput of over 1.0 Teraflop (for the testing of Mersenne numbers, roughly the equivalent of 26.5 of Cray's most powerful T932 supercomputers, at peak power.

Contacts:
Scott Kurowski, (kuroski@entropia.com) founder, Entropia.com, Inc.
George Woltman, (woltman@magicnet.net) founder of the GIMPS.

Golem@Home By: Hod Lipson and Jorday Pollack

The Golem@Home Project is a downloadable screensaver that randomly creates a population of virtual robots on your system and then evolves them (the current rule for evolution is survival of the robots who can move the greatest distance over an infinite plain). Every week or so a few of your robots will move to someone else's Golem screensaver and a few of someone else's robots will move to your screensaver (you can disable this feature if you're worried about security). These virtual robots contain Design information that can be used to build actual working robots. While you participate, any creatures born (evolved) on your computer are copyrighted to you.
Contacts:
Hod Lipson (lipson@cs.brandeis.edu) and Jordan B. Pollack (pollack@cs.brandeis.edu)

HDDI By: National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Lehigh University

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Lehigh University are developing an approach to indexing the Web called Hierarchical Distributed Dynamic Indexing (HDDI TM). In short, HDDI accomplishes tasks that are not possible with today's computer architecture. Today's search engines use static indexing and single word search to identify relevance across a small sample of the entire Internet. HDDI on the other hand enables real-time searching of the entire Internet by identifying the relevance of a phrase, not just key words.

HMMER By: United Devices, University of Washington, St. Louis

A bioinformatics research project for the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri. The project uses the Hidden Markov Modeling technique to compare known DNA sequences (amino acids) against the data from the Human Genome Project to find similar sequences.

Influenza Vaccination By: Popular Power

Popular Power is launching its network with a non-profit medical research application, available today. The company will donate resources to an ongoing research project that utilizes computer modeling as one technique to better understand influenza vaccination. For Internet users, this allows participation in a project that can have an impact on public health, and help save peoples' lives. For biotechnology companies, this application serves as a good reference application, demonstrating the power of the platform and providing an example implementation.

OceanStore By: University of California, Berkeley

OceanStore comprises a federation of utility providers who cooperate to synthesize a seamless, consistent, highly-available, mobile data platform. It is a component of the Endeavour project at Berkeley.
Unlike other file systems, OceanStore provides truly nomadic data that is free to migrate and be replicated anywhere in the world.

SETI@home By: University of California, Berkeley

A downloadable screensaver (client) allows anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to take part in the search for extraterrestrial life (analysis of radio waves gathered by the Arecibo telescope located in Puerto Rico).
How it works:

Download a screen saver that gets data over the Internet, analyzes it and then reports the results. Data analysis is broken down into independent little pieces that are worked on separately and in parallel.
Data recorded at the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico fills about one 35 Gbyte DLT tape per day. Because Arecibo does not have a high bandwidth Internet connection, the data tape is mailed (snail-mail) to Berkeley. Then the data is divided into 0.25 Mbyte chunks--"work-units"-which are then sent from the Seti@Home server over the Internet to people around the world to analyze.

Contacts:
David Anderson (davea@ssl.berkeley.edu), Project Director at University of California-Berkeley.
Dan Werthimer (danw@ssl.berkeley.edu), Chief Scientist.