Digg is running on the followings

• Caching (Memcache)
• Distributed file system (MogileFS)
• Monitoring (Nagios)
• Asynchronous Processing (Gearman)

To know more about the architecture, you can read the followings

• How Digg works
• Digg Database Architecture
• High Scalability - Digg Architecture

eBay

Existing eBay website is built using Java. There is a good presentation on the eBay architecture. It is interesting to see the evolution to Perl based script to Microsoft IIS, and the to a custom built Java solution.

YoutTube

YouTube is built using Python, running on Apache under Linux, using MySQL as the database server.  More details at YouTube architecture.

Amazon

Amazon is using a mixture of technologies (Perl, C++, Java, Mason) running under JBoss in Linux using Oracle. Amazon architecture is a fully-distributed, decentralized, services platform serving many different applications. More details at Amazon Architecture.

It has some very useful features. Some of them are: Galaxy feature that able to render Milky Way galaxy and Ruler feature that draws orbits of a planets and their projections on the Sun. As Solar Model uses own related-sizes system, which only shows what planet on which place from the Sun, how planets moves and rotates; user cannot estimate real proportions of the bodies, because real proportions will simply make all planets difficult to find in the dark space, the Sun would occupy too much place while comparing it with any other planet.

The GRASS source code is written in portable ANSI-C and is fully POSIX compliant. It runs on most known flavors of UNIX including Linux, Solaris, and Mac OSX, as well as MS Windows with Cygwin.

Development is well underway on a native MS Windows port, with an experimental version available for download now. GRASS has been run on everything from supercomputers to handheld PDAs. It is well adapted for life on a single-user workstation, a large multi-user system, or application server and thin clients, with mapset-level access control. Cross platform GUI toolkits are used to ensure a consistent user experience regardless of the hardware. The old GUI used Tcl/Tk, the new GUI is using WxPython.

The vision is that hardware and software platform for Personal Robotics – robots that do tasks for humans in human environments – will enable breakthrough robotics applications, much as PCs and DOS enabled a new set of computing applications two decades ago.

ROS - Robot Open Source

ROS, the name of the software platform means two things: Robot Operating System, a loose analogy to a computer operating system and Robot Open Source.

ROS (Robot Operating System) is the software platform for mobile manipulation robotics. The ROSCore communications framework provides the functional software nodes with a common method of talking to each other across the onboard and off board computers (OS and language independent), making it easy to pass data, results of analyses and commands from anywhere to anywhere in the system.

As quoted from the website,

Processing is a simple programming environment that was created to make it easier to develop visually oriented applications with an emphasis on animation and providing users with instant feedback through interaction. The developers wanted a means to “sketch” ideas in code. As its capabilities have expanded over the past six years, Processing has come to be used for more advanced production-level work in addition to its sketching role. Originally built as a domain-specific extension to Java targeted towards artists and designers, Processing has evolved into a full-blown design and prototyping tool used for large-scale installation work, motion graphics, and complex data visualization.

You can now upload your own data set and create data visualization with Many Eyes

The heart of Many Eyes is a collection of data visualizations.

On Many Eyes you can:

• View and discuss visualizations
• View and discuss data sets
• Create visualizations from existing data sets
• Rate data sets and visualizations
• Upload your own data
• Create and participate in topic hubs
• Select items to watch
• Track your contributions, watchlist, and topic hubs
• See comments that others have written to you

Acid2 tests aspects of HTML markup, CSS styling, PNG images, and data URIs. It should render correctly on any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. The idea is that if both web sites and web browsers follow agreed-upon industry standards, then any web site will work the same in any web browser.

There is a comic book on it here.

From the Google website, it will be available for beta download starting 2 September 2008.

Prism lets users add their favorite web apps to their desktop environment:

This service model of DHT usage greatly simplifies deploying client applications. By using OpenDHT as a highly-available naming and storage service, clients can ignore the complexities of deploying and maintaining a DHT and instead concentrate on developing more sophisticated distributed applications.

OpenDHT’s simple put-get interface is accessible over both Sun RPC and XML RPC. As such, the service is easy to access from virtually every programming language and from behind almost all NATs and firewalls.

It is similar to Google App Engine but is more for academic research purposes.

GridGain is the open source grid computing software for Java. It is dual-licensed under LGPL and Apache 2.0 licenses and is built on open source software foundation

BOINC is a software platform for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing.  BOINC is designed to support applications that have large computation requirements, storage requirements, or both. The main requirement of the application is that it be divisible into a large number (thousands or millions) of jobs that can be done independently.

BOINC is used by SETI@home

Globus Toolkit is an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications. It is being developed by the Globus Alliance and many others all over the world.

NGrid is an open source (LGPL) grid computing framework written in C#. NGrid aims to be platform independent via the Mono project.

Other useful references

• Open Grid Forum
• Open Grid Service Architecture represents an evolution towards a Grid system architecture based on Web services concepts and technologies.
• Software components for grid systems and applications.

E.g., in a 6/49 lottery (the most common world wide) there are 13,983,816 possible combinations. If, say, every combination were to come out just once, in random order, in 14 million draws, then at 2 draws per week (104 per year), it would take just under 135,000 years for ALL the combinations to come out.

To be assured of a 99.9% degree of certainty that your combination will hit, you would in fact have to play every draw for around 664,000 years!

I am not a gambler but part of my research includes statistical analysis.

Here is an interesting software for you to carry out statistical analysis on lotto, the MDIEditor and Lotto WE.