Project Idea: X@home

 
I would like to create a platform (x@home) that allows users to volunteer their free computer time to solving computationally intensive problems similar to the folding@home and seti@home projects. With the two mentioned @home projects, you subscribe to each problem individually, but this project is based around the idea of creating a main server that enables the user to subscribe to various different problems with ease.

The goal of this project is to create an infrastructure that can benefit problems of any sort that can use distributed computing. Thus, the problems this project works on will vary depending on the user-bases interests. The problems ideal for this site will need a few days' computation time, as these are substantial projects that will not monopolize the system and will allow for a volunteered computer to help out with multiple projects.

Volunteered computers will download a program that runs in the background, ascertains when the user's computer is idle and then pings the main server to get details about current problems and starts to work on one of the user's chosen problems. This will primarily involve process parallelism, but thread parallelism will be tested to see if it can be efficient over the internet.

Any Unix-based machine with ssh and openMPI should be able to subscribe to the cluster. I will be benchmarking the project with particles code (generates particles in a disk and performs computationally intensive operations on them: mean, std deviation, etc.) and a prime number generator.