List of distributed computing / decentralized computing Projects and personal opinions about them

[Doesnotcomputeanymore]

Hit us with some nice distributed computing Projects YOU like.

Which ones are your favorites and why?

 

everything from "completely charity":

• F@H (Folding at home) - (CPU / GPU)
• BOINC in general - (CPU  / GPU)
• GPUGRID - (GPU)

to somewhat "invest - return" based, if you want it:

• SheepIt - (CPU / GPU)

to the more scetchy stuff:

• Tor - (Network)
• Freene - ( Network / Storage)
• Storj - ( Network / Storage) - I know not thaaaat controversial, please don't insult me over that categorization

 

1. Please no standalone blockchain-crypto stuff.
2. The general vibe should tend towards enabling science, people benefits
   eg. Protein folding, distributed storage, research, LLM training
   and less "Calculating Pi to the 1'000'000'000'000'000th digit", "Calculating all possible Go or Chess moves", etc..
   (I know those are awesome too but don't match the stuff that I had in mind)
3. keep it ethically harmless (Freenet pretty much goes too far - Torrenting is okay)
4. I'm aware of the wikipedia lists but they are boring, unpersonal and looong

 

Do you have a sick setup you want to share?

Give us some inspiration.

[Doesnotcomputeanymore]

Me personally, I have a blazing fast internet connection, a pulic IP and absolutely no use for it.

I know there were games that had P2P-update functions but I don't know if there are still some out there.

I also would be interested if there is a service that let's you act as a load balancing node of any kind like Video streams, Update Packages or stuff like that.

I'm already fully automatically seeding every new Linux-Distro-Torrent in a cluster of 5 Raspberrys with SSDs attached.
But they max out at 100 - 200 MBit/s even on good days; And it looks suspiciously like always the same chinese IPs are leeching the torrents.

[porina]

My pet project is PrimeGrid, which might not meet your worthiness preferences. It is searching for prime numbers in various forms. Will it serve humanity? Maybe in a very indirect way in the very long term. Some of the subprojects are looking to prove/disprove conjectures, which could have knock on effects for future work, which could be used for... something. This may sound very abstract but an example I use is a French mathematician from around 200 years ago. Amongst other things, he played about with number field theory. Could he even imagine that would form the building block of many commonly used error correction systems enabling the digital world we live in today?

 

Honourable mention would go to World Community Grid. That does various "benefit humanity" projects but I feel less engaged in it.