Another Distributed Computing Effort: CSC

Armin Lenz writes "DCypher.Net, a newly formed distributed computing effort, takes up french encryption specialist CS Group on their challenge to break their 56 bit CS-Cipher key. After successfully completing beta testing, the project officially launched Monday, November 8. During the first days only basic stats will be available, but contributors are invited to download the final client and start work asap. "

Comments

Competition is great, but with the right challenge

[dbaker]

Moo!

Although some competition would be great among the distributed computing projects, dcypher.net seems to have picked a bad contest to try and get off the ground with. Perhaps more of a "marathon" challenge would be optimal, instead of the "sprint" that CSC provides.

We had already announced our intent to do CSC, and have an enormous amount of computing power in comparison to the newly-formed dcypher. Dcypher really can't expect to beat us to the CSC key, and after one unsuccessful challenge, their users will likely be unmotivated to stay around.

At this point, our CSC/OGR clients are only in a beta testing phase; however, based on the few hours that we've been running this public beta, our key-checking rate is at least twice that of dcypher. We'll probably be releasing the final clients in the next week or two, and at that point, our rate will be large enough that we should be able to exhaust the entire keyspace in a few weeks.

Daniel

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Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net

Re:It's not distributed computing...

[Otto]

Dcypher is not distributed computing, it's client-server, as are SETI and d.net. There is a HUGE difference between client-server and distributed computing. Perhaps slashdot should label it cooperative computing instead.

Err... You're wrong, and yet right at the same time.. wow, good job!

SETI and d.net and in fact the entire internet are "client-server". The Web is client-server. Telnet is client-server. Nearly every single piece of software on the internet is client-server. It really doesn't say a lot about what the software does, though..

Seti@home and d.net are distributed computing.

Let's define distributed computing, shall we? According to PC Webopedia here, distributed computing is:

A type of computing in which different components and objects comprising an application can be located on different computers connected to a network. So, for example, a word processing application might consist of an editor component on one computer, a spell-checker object on a second computer, and a thesaurus on a third computer. In some distributed computing systems, each of the three computers could even be running a different operating system.
Distributed computing is a natural outgrowth of object-oriented programming. Once programmers began creating objects that could be combined to form applications, it was a natural extension to develop systems that allowed these objects to by physically located on different computers.

In the specific cases of seti@home and d.net, they are taking a large project, splitting it up into small pieces, and running it all over the place. Now, there may be a problem, as our definition above implies that each "object" running on each system is different. We can define our object as being our code, but we can also, more intuitively, define our object as being our code running on our data. This conforms more towards the object-oriented methodology. All the objects are inheriting the same source code, but different data. Each bit of code running on each person's computer is running a different bit of data. This is the whole point, in fact. So therefore, all the objects are, in fact, different instances. There we go. Good enough for me.

Damn, I must be pretty bored to respond to that post.. Hmm.. Guess I need a beer.

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