Rosetta@Home (Christians)

Rosetta@Home determines the shapes of proteins for the purpose of creating new treatments for cancer, HIV, malaria, Alzheimer's, and others. Specific details available here.

Einstein@Home (Christians)

Einstein@Home searches for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations. The data from the project is loosely connected with investigation of superstring theory insofar as it deals with gravitational waves.

Folding@Home: Protein Folding Research (Nerds for Jesus)

Study how proteins "fold" in order to better understand this fundamental behavior of amino acid chains. Improper protein folding leads to diseases like Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, and Mad Cow (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

United Devices (grid.org): Cancer Drug Research (Project Closed) (Christians)

Studies how different molecules interact with proteins. Could lead to development of new drugs.

Find-A-Drug: Searching for New Cancer Medicines (Project Closed)

The F-A-D project used a much-enhanced version of the THINK algorithm which United Devices previously used to find potentially promising drug interactions. The project ended in December 2005 after more than 68 billion molecules and nearly 300 protein queries had been processed.

Genome@Home
(Project Closed)

Intended to design new genes that can form working proteins in a human cell, which would lead to new developments in pharmaceuticals and gene therapy. The project ended in March 2004 when the directors' statement: "It has accumulated a large database of protein sequences, which will be used for important scientific purposes for many years by our group and many others throughout the world." Unfortunately, it had become clear at the time that funding would soon cease. However, the sister project, Folding@Home (which is also hosted by Stanford University), is still going strong.

Distributed.Net: Finding an Optimal Golomb Ruler

OGR's have many applications including sensor placements for X-ray crystallography and radio astronomy. Golomb rulers can also play a significant role in combinatorics, coding theory and communications. We have "pretty good" OGR rulers of many lengths, but we can't be positive the known ruler for a given length is the best one until we do an exhaustive search of the ruler space, which is computationally intensive.

Distributed.Net: Cracking RC5-64

RSA was offering a $10,000 to the first person or team who can crack the RC5-64 code. The project has the auxiliary purpose of showing how weak federal encryption standards are, especially since the "sanctioned" one is much, much weaker than RC5-64. This project was completed in July, 2002, with the key being found by a gentleman in Japan on a PII-450. The decrypted message was:

The unknown message is: Some things are better left unread

("The unknown message is:" was a known part of the message when the contest began)

Since it took hundreds of thousands of computers around the world almost 5 years to find the key, it's been argued the stated objective to prove RC5-64 is a weak standard has failed miserably. However, in early 2002 the Feds decided to up their encryption levels to such heights, a project like this would NEVER¹ crack it. Whether or not Dnet's work had anything to with the decision is debateable.

¹: Me saying "never" here is probably going to look pretty silly 100 years from now.

I originally thought the Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search (GIMPS) Just a silly mathematical exercise, but it has uncovered *huge* primes, putting it in the running for some lucrative prizes!

I can't get motivated to rejoin the project, though, because the work itself is, IMO, meaningless, especially when you consider other projects are seeking to fight cancer and genetic defects.