What tasks require a lot of computing power and can be distributed?

Question

Distributed Computing

The background is this: you need to write a term paper, and you want to write some kind of distributed system. But so far I can't find an interesting task that requires a lot of CPU time, i.e. which would have to be distributed.
For example, rendering (most recently there was an article about this on Habré). What other tasks require large capacities and can be distributed ? They are interested in practically valuable tasks , and not in the utilization of capacities to nowhere (calculation of the number pi, etc.).

Answer 1

you can look in the direction of large amounts of data and work with them. sharding, partitioning, replication.
or simpler just processing a large number of files. for example, creating a data file based on other data with their processing and sorting.
graphics, video, also requires decent calculations .. and of course serious mathematics.

Answer 2

try to calculate pi

Answer 3

Read about mapreduce .

Answer 4

A wide class of problems are reduced to global optimization, where parallel computing is relevant and possible. Works on this topic are common and well googled.
If you are interested in robotics, there are many computationally difficult tasks in it, where distributed computing is relevant. For example, a popular robot operating system uses a modular in-plane navigation system - one algorithm can run on one machine with a global map, another algorithm on another machine with a local one. For more information about the navigation module, follow the link: wiki.ros.org/move_base.
Here and therea couple more examples from the search engine. Many behavior-based robot control systems and systems built on the basis of the "syndicate" paradigm are easily parallelized.