Welcome to the Real World!

Distributed computing has many real-world applications. In this section you will learn how distributed computing can be used to solve tough mathematical problems, create 3-dimensional movies, and search for extraterrestrial life.

SETI@home is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at home. Using the worldıs largest radio telescope, three servers, and two million users, the SETI@home project hopes to listen-in on some alien signals.

The RC5-64 project is similar to searching for a needle in a haystack ‹ removing hay piece by piece until the needle is found. Usersı computers process blocks of encrypted data, hoping to find the one key that will unlock the encrypted message.

Huge prime numbers are the bounty of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. The search has been going on for four years now, and each year a record-breaking prime is found. Discover what makes Mersenne primes so special and why people are eager to find them.

Golomb Rulers. Find out how Golomb rulers are quickly become staples in the mathematical world after only having been in existence for less than fifty years!

While companies can get processing power for free from interested users, that may change if distributed computing goes commercial. Read about some start-up companies that hope to create a new business industry using d.c., and how you could get paid for your CPU cycles.

Tired of waiting for a website to load? Wonder how some websites load very quickly while others seem to take forever? Find out about content delivery, the new distributed computing way for slow, graphics-filled websites to become as quick as their static counterparts.

Learn about the various ways distributed computing can be used in mathematics, and how distributed computing is helping to prove some mathematicians of the past right (or wrong!).

There are numerous new projects on the horizon. Someday distributed computing projects may help save the world- read about new projects to find out more.

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