MetaFilter posts tagged with distributed

Daisy, Daisy

flatluigi — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:01:43 -0800

shake shake shake

fantabulous timewaster — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:31:36 -0800

"The Quake-Catching Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world's largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers." The Economist's writeup notes that, since network communications are (sometimes) faster than the speed of sound in the earth's crust, a distributed network's observations of a temblor might reach a warning network before the quake itself reaches a traditional seismometer. This appears to be the first use of Berkeley's Open Infrastructure for Network Computing as a sensor network, rather than for number-crunching.

Fractal Dream Interpretation

fenriq — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:59:13 -0800

Electric Sheep: Collaborative Fractal Generation
Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears.

You can look at some fresh samples or you can read the Interpretation, watch the Sheepumentary, post a comment, design your own or design them and post them to their server or download a copy and play along at home.
You can even get a copy of the source code to play around with if you're so inclined.

Me? I'm just gonna l o o k a t t h e p r e t t y p i c t u r e s.

Where do the ebooks come from?

phyrewerx — Sun, 22 Dec 2002 20:11:18 -0800

Distributed Proofreaders is a collaborative effort in proofreading ebooks before they are submitted to Project Guttenberg. [more inside]

walrus — Fri, 01 Nov 2002 11:48:34 -0800

Google Compute is a distributed computing project involving users of the google toolbar. It's a light application which uses idle processor cycles to analyse data for "carefully selected charitable projects, with the guiding principle being to help humanity and advance scientific knowledge".