# Who is involved in a distributed (grid) computing project? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 26, 2012, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807 "2012-03-26T01:58:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@dzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dzero)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2012, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/1 "2012-03-26T01:58:58Z")
I’ve been involved with the World Community Grid for several years and it’s become something of an addiction. I know that there are scores of such projects out there and I’m sure a lot of people here must be involved in one or more of them. ---
**Author:** ![Folacin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folacin/32/3195_2.png) [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2012, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/2 "2012-03-26T02:03:17Z")
World Community Grid also. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/3 "2012-03-28T02:03:10Z")
[World Community Grid](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/). I figure IBM does a decent job of filtering the projects for software glitches. [Here are their current projects](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/viewAllProjects.do). I’m currently supporting solar energy research, fighting prevalent third world diseases and studying water filtration methods. Other work focuses on childhood cancer and protein folding. Years ago, I had SETI installed on my machine. The software has been jiggered to be laptop friendly – you can arrange to run the program only when the computer is plugged in, so you don’t drain your battery. I understand that the combined distributed processing power of [BOINC](http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) exceeds that of the [fastest supercomputers](http://www.top500.org/). Though it could still use [your help](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewAboutUs.do). [Join now!](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do) ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2012, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/4 "2012-03-28T02:56:25Z")
I’ve written some very basic cloud applications using [Hadoop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop), and I expect to do more advanced things in the future. ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2012, 11:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/5 "2012-03-29T11:03:26Z")
My computer at work runs the University of Leipzig’s [FindLinks](http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/nextlinks/index_en.html) client. It’s a distributed web crawler, the results of which are used for research on and using large web corpora (which is part of my job), as well as for a website-recommending application called NextLinks (which I don’t use and have actually never tried). ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2012, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-involved-in-a-distributed-grid-computing-project/616807/6 "2012-04-08T01:37:32Z")
## So 85% of the posters on this board are involved with a distributed computing project according to this poll. That’s amazing! 😉 Incidentally, there’s a SDMB team at World Community Grid. It’s called Teeming Millions, and it was formed in 2004. I see that it has 11 members. [World Community Grid - Team](http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=LS5RSMBR9N1)