Yoyo@home

Yoyo@home is not a single research project but rather a BOINC-based umbrella platform: it wraps and distributes work units from multiple independent mathematical computing efforts that don't have the resources to run their own BOINC servers. A single volunteer, attaching once, can contribute to five or more distinct problems in rotation.

Active subprojects include ECM (Elliptic Curve Method factorization of large numbers, complementing General Number Field Sieve), OGR (Optimal Golomb Rulers — identifying perfectly-spaced measuring rulers, a combinatorial optimization problem with applications in radio astronomy and cryptography), Nontrivial Collatz Cycle (searching astronomically large numbers for counterexamples to the Collatz conjecture), Perfect Cuboid (one of the most famous open problems in elementary number theory), and a rotating selection of shorter-term projects.

Yoyo@home is operated by Rechenkraft.net e.V., a registered German non-profit association founded in 2005 to support volunteer computing. The platform has been running continuously since 2007, making it one of the longest-lived projects in the BOINC ecosystem. A recent highlight: in December 2024 the project discovered a 75-digit prime factor of an XYYXF number via ECM — the largest ECM factor found in all of 2024.

For volunteers, Yoyo@home is the archetypal “set and forget” project: one configuration exposes your computer to a constantly-rotating portfolio of mathematical research, so your contribution never becomes stale.