Collaborative efforts

Distributed computing

 

The recent years have seen some enourmous projects started by collaborative efforts when they were out of grasp for a single individual or even by a small group of people. Some of these efforts (possible only because of the huge communication features of the Internet) have grabed my interest. I want to present them here. You may know some of them; I hope to surprise you with some not-well-known but appaling projects.

• The WorldForge Project is developing a complete system for massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.
• Internet Movie Project: This dream is to create a movie with the POV-Ray raytracer, as a collaborative effort of many users over the whole world, without earning money, just for the fun of it, "because it can be done" - very much like POV-Ray itself is developed.
• SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
• The mother of all collaborative efforts: The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software: the GNU system. Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the kernel Linux, are now widely used; though these systems are often referred to as ``Linux'', they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.
• ReactOS is an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers.
• The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses the power of thousands of small computers like yours to solve the seemingly intractable problem of finding HUGE prime numbers. Specifically, GIMPS looks for Mersenne Primes, expressed by the formula 2^P-1. Over 8,000 people have contributed computer time to help discover world-record Mersenne primes. Thoughout history, the largest known prime number has usually been a Mersenne prime. [No longer available].

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Latest update: 23-aug-08

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