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How about gimps?

The date given for the filing is April 18, 1997. This is long after the beginning of GIMPS in January, 1996. Long before Intel even filed for a patent on this exact sort of computing. Perhaps George Woltman, spokesman of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, has a case against Intel for theft of intellectual property.

52 years old... If they restore it to actual operational status I'll bet they don't run it for very long at a time. Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find.

Tubes aren't as hard to come by as you might think. Lots of companies are still selling 'em. The biggest of 'em is Antique Electronic Supply in Arizona; a couple of others I can think of off the top of my head are CWest Tubes in Utah and Fair Radio Sales in Ohio. The audiophooles have driven the prices of some types (especially power triodes) through the roof, but many types still sell for just a few dollars each, including (IIRC) the 12A_7 types that boatanchor computers more than likely would've used by the gross. (If they're interested in economizing, they could retrofit the machine to use some of the goofball tube types developed for TV use, which are dirt-cheap...but since they're working with a one-of-a-kind machine, they probably don't want to hack it up too badly.)

In fact, I've heard from some people that it's actually harder to fix old transistor radios than it is to fix similar equipment built with tubes, since early transistors have become scarcer than hens' teeth. Early ICs can be equally hard to come by (some talk came up in comp.sys.apple2 a while back about the feasibility of reproducing the Apple I from schematics, and someone noted that some of the chips used in that machine's design are no longer available.

With all that said, the machine would more than likely be on static display most of the time. They might fire it up for special occasions or just to verify that it still works, but I doubt they'll have it participating in GIMPS 24/7. :-)

Check out George Woltman's links to distributed computing projects. This is not a comprehensive list, but includes most of the famous math/science related projects out there.

2 years? What is d.net hoping to prove? Are they just interested in spending furious amounts of energy processing needless keys?

Personally, I spend my computer's idle time finding mersenne primes. Seems a bit more worthy than beating a 2 year old dead horse.

I think the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) should be included in this list. We're (I'm a part of it) have a couple thousand users going, and we're one of the few projects who actually have results to show (the three largest primes known to mankind, in just a few years). It has some advantages over some of the others (like very low bandwidth requirements), but it has some disadvantages as well (no fancy GUI, just a working one), but this is not intended as a comparison between those five.

/* Steinar */

This shows only that projects like GIMPS (which IMHO beats distributed.net), distributed.net and SETI@Home has done what part their original intention is: Lead the way for other distributed efforts.

Without having looked at the article, though, it looks like this will be much less accessible for the masses. GIMPSers (check http://www.mersenne.org if you're interested) have months or even years to complete a single assignments -- this one sounds like it will need the data in time. In other words, only 24/7 (or almost-24/7)-online computers will be able to participate effectively. I wonder how it will cope with having a variable amount of information available as well. OK, off to read the article :-)

/* Steinar */

You mean like www.mersenne.org?

AFAIK, that program also uses 'lost' cycles, and they've already got some results. (As opposed to SETI ;-)

The GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) software will stress the FPU and main memory bus. It was very carefully coded in assembler by George Woltman to run at high speed on a Intel CPU. It is an excellent stress/reliability test. If anything is flakey/marginal on your system, you will usually find out about it very quickly.

For a list of links to worthwhile distributed projects, visit Mersenne.org.

Please remember that Seti@Home is only one of many distributed projects. Check out www.mersenne.org. The gimps project may have found a megaprime (We are double checking at this time), which if you recall, is worth $50,000 from the EFF (Not to mention a plug in the Guinness book of worlds records for finding the 38th Mersenne prime). Also, word is that Seti@Home is running out of data and is sending the same stuff to participants over and over again...

There is indeed.. the Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search (GIMPS) uses spare cycles to find mersenne primes (i.e. 2^prime# - 1 , if it's prime, is a mersenne prime) you can find the page here.

-gleam

Correct, the EFF has. To join the search, visit The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), they are ones you would like to join, unless you got a Cray.

The prize is $50,000 for the first 1 million digit prime, $100,000 for the first 10 million and so on up to 1 billion digits. It all goes to you.

/* Steinar */

SETI is crap. Period. Read, say, Ernst Mayr's "The Probability of Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life."

I'm all for using spare cycles on your computer, but at least use them for something useful. SETI ain't it. My recommendation would be projects like the Mersenne Prime search at http://www.mersenne.org.

Adam Beberg (duncan) wrote:
it has become apparent that the goals of DCTI have changed considerably over the years, and are no longer the same as what they were.

David McNett (nugget) wrote:
It has also become clear to us that Adam's goals for Cosm and distributed.net's vision of its future differ enough to justify this parting of ways. Adam is very motivated about seeing the system he's designed, Cosm, implemented and put into production. True to its name, distributed.net is more focused on seeing what can result from a truly open and distributed continuing development effort. While each of these respective approaches is viable in its own right, attempting to co-mingle them has proven to be counterproductive.

What's the division about? It's clear from these carefully worded pieces that they've decided to split, and they've put an amiable face on it. However, the announcements are so vague I can't tell what the real issues are.

One of the problems I've always had with the d.net project was their closed decision-making style. On the one hand, they've build this wonderful thing for running the DES/rc contests, and made it fun to participate. I think that's really nifty. On the other hand, they've been advertising 'v3' for a over a year now, with its plug-in architecture promising a wide variety of clients to choose from, and an open interface so one may write one's own. But it never arrived, partly, it seemed, because Beberg wouldn't let anyone else work on it. Sometimes I felt like they didn't want to allow any other clients because they'd lose people from the rc effort, which is what they're really interested it. I think this might not be such a problem given rc5's microscopic bandwidth, footprint, and tolerance for latency compared to alot of other distributed computing projects If you think seti@home is bad, try cg rendering, or scientific simulations! Even the Mersenne prime client is more efficient with a large (>~16MB) memory allocation.

Nugget speaks of "a truly open and distributed continuing development effort." Their hot new client is the OGR project, and still closed source. Beberg is at least publishing a programming interface, but hasn't specified a license yet.

I've always been bothered by d.net's interest in using my processor for their particular project, paying only lip service to giving (control) back to the community they created. I've always been bothered by their failure to grok open source development.

I guess what all this boils down to is that I'd like to think that either Beberg or others at d.net have seen some light in this vein, but I can't tell which of them it might be. Comments?

This is a serious advantage rc5 has over most of the other distributed computing projects--it's got a microscopic memory footprint.

d.net's only looking at 64bits at a time.

ok, that's facetious, but they're trying to decrypt a one-line message. Seti@Home is trying to analyse radio signals, and the unit of work is significantly bigger--350K on my machine. It's constantly doing fourier transforms of that and searching for peaks and trends. I don't think you could do that efficiently is much less memory.

So yes, until everybody's got 128MB of RAM, this will limit participation.

You could try the GIMPS project ( www.mersenne.org). It's not as sexy perhaps, but still new territory. My client weighs in at 1.6 MB.

You can find a list here.


...phil

Some do.

GIMPS, "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search", is currently pullling more than half a teraflop using idle cycles to find large prime numbers, and the source for its clients is at http://www.mersenne.org/source.htm .

--Joe

Some do.

GIMPS, "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search", is currently pullling more than half a teraflop using idle cycles to find large prime numbers, and the source for its clients is at http://www.mersenne.org/source.htm .

--Joe