Distributed Computing

The Genome Collective

The Overclockers Network

Team Picard

The Knights Who Say... Ni!

Free-DC

Genome@Home

The Human Genome Project is nearing completion, and scientists are working hard to develop the understanding needed to use this wealth of genetic information in ways that will be significant to medicine and humankind. One of the most important ways to do this is to study the other genomes and individual gene sequences that are already available to us. By understanding how these genomes work, we will be able to put the huge amounts of data (over 50, 000 genes and 3 billion nucleotide base pairs) from the Human Genome Project into biological and medical context, giving it real meaning.

The goal of Genome@home is to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell. Genome@home uses a computer algorithm (SPA), based on the physical and biochemical rules by which genes and proteins behave, to design new proteins (and hence new genes) that have not been found in nature. By comparing these "virtual genomes" to those found in nature, we can gain a much better understanding of how natural genomes have evolved and how natural genes and proteins work. Some important applications of the Genome@home virtual genome protein design database:

• engineering new proteins for medical therapy
• designing new pharmaceutical
• assigning functions to the dozens of new genes being sequenced every day
• understanding protein evolution

Distributed Folding

With the draft Human Genome scientists have only a 'flat' view of the molecular structures of proteins that make up the working parts of living cells and the human organism. Proteins are the parts that make up the machinery of living cells. In order to really understand what a protein does, scientists need to know the 3-dimensional structure of the protein and understand how several proteins assemble into these living machines. By knowing how proteins behave, scientists can better understand how proteins misbehave and cause diseases. With the structures of proteins scientists can better create new effective therapeutics to treat myriad diseases.

It has been estimated that it would take many hundreds of years to perform all the computations necessary to accurately predict the structure of a protein given only its chemical make-up on even the fastest supercomputers in the world. Protein structures are currently solved, very slowly and at high cost, in the lab by examining X-ray diffraction patterns of protein crystals, or through Nuclear Magnetic Resonance experiments.

The Hogue Lab research team at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute has developed a new algorithm to sample the structure of an entire protein through non-exhaustive sampling of its possible 3-dimensional shapes, guided by probability distributions. Although still requiring computation sizes of supercomputer magnitude, these computations can be performed in parallel, on thousands of desktop computers, rather than an extremely expensive supercomputer

The protein folding problem has two parts - sampling large amounts of protein fold space, and picking which protein fold out of that sample is the right one. If this program can sample a nearly correct protein structure, it will be proven capable of solving the sampling part of the protein folding problem. Another problem still remains in detecting which of the billions of protein structures is the correct one. Solving both parts of the protein folding problem would revolutionize the process of deciphering the Human Genome and understanding how the machinery of life assembles and operates. And, once a protein structure is determined, it is possible to determine what the protein does and how to fix or stop it to cure all kinds of diseases and ailments.

Team Ninja

The Overclockers Network

Team Picard

D2OL (Sengent)

The Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL) works to discover drug candidates against Anthrax, Smallpox, and Ebola and will soon be adding targets for the top 5 major Bioterrorism organisms. By simply downloading a no cost, non-intrusive software application, you can contribute the idle time available on your computer to fight biological weapons even when not connected to the Internet.

The D2OL software is downloaded to your personal computer and given drug candidates to evaluate. Once your computer receives tasks to execute, it begins a candidate evaluation process similar to finding the right key to fit into a lock. Distributed computing technology enables the process of sending hundreds of thousands of possible key combinations to all computing devices participating in the network and managing the results generated and returned to the network once you connect again to the internet. As a user, no intervention is required and the software executes as long as it is turned on, even when disconnected from the Internet.

Seti@Home

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that there are already thousands of computers that might be available for use. Most of these computers sit around most of the time with toasters flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is where SETI@home (and you!) come into the picture. The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us "search out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues it's analysis when you are finished with your work.

It's an interesting and difficult task. There's so much data to analyze that it seems impossible! Fortunately, the data analysis task can be easily broken up into little pieces that can all be worked on separately and in parallel. None of the pieces depends on the other pieces. Also, there is only a finite amount of sky that can be seen from Arecibo.

In the next two years the entire sky as seen from the telescope will be scanned three times. We feel that this will be enough for this project. By the time we've looked at the sky three times, there will be new telescopes, new experiments, and new approaches to SETI. We hope that you will be able to participate in them too!

Team Picard

Team Picard

ECCp-109

The ECCp-109 p[roject is a distributed effort to solve Certicom's ECCp-109 challenge. The challenge is to solve a particular elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) is the basis for a powerful cryptosystem. The very rudimentary idea of our particular problem is the following:

We have a curve, C, of the form: y2 = x3 +ax +b

For some constants 'a' and 'b'. We're also given some fixed large prime 'p'. A "point on the curve" is a pair of integers (u,v) that satisfy this equation modulo 'p'. This means, simply, that 'p' divides v2-u3-au-b. Now the leap of faith: There is a method by which we can "add" two points on the curve to get another point on the curve. We call it addition, but it looks nothing like what we normally think of as addition. Just think of it as a rule that tells us how to obtain a third point on the curve from two given points. If you know a little algebra, I'll tell you that these points together with this operation form an abelian group.

Here's the point of the challenge: Certicom has chosen a point, 'P', on this curve and a very big integer 'k'. They then computed Q := kP. This means that they added 'P' to itself 'k' times and called the result 'Q'. But there is a clever way to do this with only log(k) operations. So they can choose a REALLY big 'k', and still compute kP. Now, we know 'P' and 'Q' and our mission is to find 'k'. But 'k' is far too big to simply start trying k=1,k=2,k=3,... so we need to do it in a smarter way. Here are the exact challenge parameters for ECCp-109:

p =564538252084441556247016902735257
y2 = x3 +321094768129147601892514872825668x +430782315140218274262276694323197
P = (97339010987059066523156133908935, 149670372846169285760682371978898)
Q = (44646769697405861057630861884284, 522968098895785888047540374779097)

distributed.net (RC5-64)

The RC5-64 Project is an collaborative effort by distributed.net to tackle the 64-bit RSA Data Security Secret Key Challenge. The Secret-Key Challenge actually consists of thirteen separate but similar contests. Having successfully completed the RC5-32/12/7 contest (RC5-56) in October of 1997, distributed.net is now concentrating its resources on tackling the RC5-32/12/8 contest (RC5-64). The task involves testing (at most) 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) keys to find the one that properly decrypts the contest message.

This is a monumental undertaking that will require an enormous amount of computing power to succeed. Participants from all over the internet provide that power in the form of spare CPU cycles on their own personal computers. Together they have helped to make the Bovine Project the largest and most powerful distributed computer on Earth!

When a client finds a key that correctly deciphers the first few bytes of the message (the first part of the message is known to be the text "The unknown message is:"), and the block is submitted, the keyserver network sends an alert to the distributed.net origanizers. p Using separate software we attempt to decrypt the entire message. If successful RSA is notified. After RSA verifies that the correct key has indeed been found press releases are issued by us and RSA and the check for the prize amount ($10,000 U.S.) is mailed to distributed.net. distributed.net then distributes the money as described earlier.

Team Picard

Gimps (Prime 95)

Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians. An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only divisors are one and itself. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, etc. There are only 39 known Mersenne primes.

GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, was formed in January 1996 to discover new world-record-size Mersenne primes. GIMPS harnesses the power of thousands of small computers like yours to search for these "needles in a haystack". Most GIMPS members join the search for the thrill of possibly discovering a record-setting, rare, and historic new Mersenne primeA Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form 2P-1. There are 39 known Mersenne primes.

Finding new Mersenne primes is not likely to be of any immediate practical value. This search is primarily a recreational pursuit. However, the search for Mersenne primes has proved useful in development of new algorithms, testing computer hardware, and interesting young students in math.

GIMPS requires a Pentium class computer that is on most of the time. The program runs at the lowest possible priority. You should not see any impact on your system's performance. The program will use about 8MB of memory and about 10MB of disk space. Most importantly, you will need a lot of patience. Roughly speaking it will take about a month to run a single primality test - visit the benchmark page for a more accurate estimate on your computer.

The program talks to PrimeNet, a central server on the Internet, to get work to do and report results. The program communicates using the HTTP protocol and may require a little extra configuration to get through some firewalls. The program only sends a few hundred bytes every week or two. Thus, there is no impact on your network performance. The program does not require a continuous Internet connection and if properly configured will not automatically dial out to establish an Internet connection.

There are three types of work assigned by the server. PII-400 and faster computers get first-time primality tests. These tests require the most work and have the best chance of finding a new Mersenne prime. Pentium-90 and faster computers get double-check assignments. These assignments do not take as long and can find a Mersenne prime only if the original test had a problem. The slowest computers are assigned factoring work. This helps by eliminating some exponents for the faster computers.

With this project, contributing members do not form teams. This is an individual user project however groups of people may all contribute under a single user name.

Seventeen or Bust

SB ("Seventeen or Bust") is a distributed attack on the Sierpinski problem. The problem deals with numbers of the form N = k2n + 1, for odd k and n > 1. Numbers in this form are called Proth numbers. If, for a particular value of k, every possible choice of n results in a composite (non-prime) Proth number N, that number k is called a Sierpinski number. The Sierpinski Problem asks "what is the smallest Sierpinski number?"

John Selfridge proved, 40 years ago, that k = 78,557 is a Sierpinski number. It is generally believed that this is the smallest, but it hasn't yet been proven. To prove it, we need to find, for every k less than 78,557, some number n such that the Proth number N is prime. This has already been done for all but seventeen values of k: 4847, 5359, 10223, 19249, 21181, 22699, 24737, 27653, 28433, 33661, 44131, 46157, 54767, 55459, 65567, 67607, and 69109. We hope to break at least some, and hopefully all, of these remaining numbers.

Tuxtime

TuxTime is a new alternative to the old uptimes.net which is not active anymore. The whole idea is to create a forum for people to compete on having the biggest uptimes.

It's very simple to get up and running: After registering and logging in, you can download the uptime client for your system. The size of the file is small, and runs in a matter of seconds on the executing host. The client establishes a connection to our central database server and sends the current uptime. Your machine will then be listed in our statistics and lists. Another feature is operating system statistics; Along with the uptime, The client also sends some data about the running OS and we mix all these data together and gets a nice OS graph showing which are used the most.

Hostname	Processor	Clock (Mhz)	System	Uptime
Cat	486DX 80	80	Linux 2.2.19
Rimmer	Pentium 150	150	Linux 2.2.19
Bexley	Pentium 150	150	Linux 2.2.19
Lister	Pentium 166	150	Linux 2.2.19
Kochanski	Pentium III 450	450	Linux 2.2.19
Holly	Celeron 466	466	Linux 2.2.19
Criten	TBird-C 1000	1450	Linux 2.2.19