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Yes, there is a existing project to use distributed computing for real work and allow researchers and others to plug in.

Cosm

Check out Cosm.

Probably long enough that you'd never live to see the completion. 32 PIII's wouldn't do squat. As of May 4th, Distributed.net has the equivilant of
72,000 PII/266's running around the clock, and are
completing about .03% of the keyspace per day. Quite frankly, 32 PIII's don't amount to anything at that kind of scale.

On the subject, I really like what they're doing with the cosm project. Think generic distributed.net, people can put in their own projects, put up their own reward system, it's the world's largest beowulf cluster -- okay, not strictly speaking but it's still a hell of a lot of horsepower.

Unlike what the Wired article was looking for, there was no internal conflict that led to the breakup.

It was simply a matter that Cosm and myself have been headed one way, and others in distributed.net want to head another. So we parted ways. It was the Best option for Cosm and distributed.net both.

My goals since long ago have been to build a general purpose architecture for large scale distributed computing. A system that will allow projects all over the world to get done, while maintaining security and data integrity. That is what Cosm is.

All the Cosm information that's available is at http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/cosm/ and more is going up every day.

As has always been the plan, Cosm source will be public, both for development reasons, and security/trust issues. This is due to happen in a few more days (May 1), but could not happen until a design and framework were available to guide the code. A lot of very tough problems have had to be solved during that process. And now it's time to make Phase 1 happen.

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?