Distributed Computing

Distributed Computing (sometimes used synonymously with the terms Parallel Computing or Multi-Threaded Programming which are separate, but related, concepts) is the running of an application across many different devices.

Resources

• Stanford University - Folding@Home project: http://folding.stanford.edu/ (project which runs "protein-folding simulations" distributedly across many users' devices)
• University of Washington -- Rosetta@home project: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/
• UCLA Berkley -- Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) - SETI@home project: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ (project whose free program distributedly downloads & analyzes radio telescope data across many user's devices)
• University of Wisconsin -- Einstein@Home project: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ (uses your computer's idle time to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope, and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite)
• European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) -- LHC@home project: http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/ (by contributing spare processing capacity on their home and laptop computers, volunteers may run simulations of beam dynamics and particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider)
• World Community Grid: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ (Help power cutting-edge research in health, poverty & sustainability) | Computing for Clean Water
• Oxford University -- Climateprediction.net project: http://www.climateprediction.net/ (unused clock cycles and CPU processing power are utilized to assist ClimatePrediction.net's servers in crunching statistical weather data in order to predict climate models and more reliably forecast the weather)
• Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search (calculates Prime numbers for increasingly large numbers)
• BitCoin & AltCoins: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Altcoin (distributed digital currency generation by solving "blockchains")

External Links

• wikipedia: List of distributed computing projects
• wikipedia: Distributed computing
• wikipedia: Parallel computing
• wikipedia: Thread (computing)
• wikipedia: Explicit multi-threading
• wikipedia: Concurrency pattern
• wikipedia: Threaded code
• wikipedia: Thread safety
• wikipedia: Tail recursion
• wikipedia: Join-pattern
• wikipedia: Non-blocking algorithm
• wikipedia: Memory model (programming)
• wikipedia: Consistency model
• wikipedia: Computation
• wikipedia: Calculation
• SETI -- BOINC - E.T.’s Home Phone: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/5/24/18637942/seti-home-aliens-citizen-science-extraterrestrial-life-20th-anniversary
• Distributed Locks Are Dead, Long Live Distributed Locks: https://dzone.com/articles/distributed-locks-are-dead-long-live-distributed-l
• Building Netflix’s Distributed Tracing Infrastructure: https://netflixtechblog.com/building-netflixs-distributed-tracing-infrastructure-bb856c319304

See Also

Cloud Computing | OS | SW | AI | Programming | Hardware