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Distributed.net Does CSC
The fine folks over at Distributed.net have appraised me of the fact that the long awaited CSC clients have been rolled out, as of a few hours ago. The full details went out on the mailing list recently regarding CSC and the new clients. Upgrade your clients, because they'll start serving keys in just a couple hours, and we can keep Team Slashdot in first place.
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.
*groan* distributed.net has been running closed clients for awhile now. What I wouldn't give to know what makes those things tick. Well, time for a shameless plug... a friend of mine (and myself!) are working on a program that has some rather, ummm, interesting features. Namely it's distributed processing (hence the post under this thread!). What makes it cool is that a) we're releasing it under GPL, and b) has never been done before.
You see, my friend has thrown some genetic programming together with some math syntax checking / validation and created a novel program that can reverse-engineer algorithms. You give it the inputs you fed the "black box" and the output(s) it produced, and it divines what algorithm was used to do it. You can immediately see the benefits here. So I thought I'd plug it - it's a helluva lot more flexible than distributed.net (anybody can run a server - you got the source!), it's free, and it may be one of the first so-called 'software patents' to be licensed under GPL (as soon as I have some spare $$$, I might just do that too!). Oh yes... did I mention we're cooking some algorithms right now that'll hopefully let you find primes on a linear timescale instead of exponential? *evil grin* Noooo Mr. NSA... that's not *my* algorithm.... =)
If anybody's interested in pitching in, we could use a few extra hands getting the code all nice and prrrty and out into the hands of fellow slashdotters. =) mail me!
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As of the time of this post (04:00UTC), we're just about to hit 200Mkey/second. We've completed a little over .007% of the keyspace. Although this seems very slow, it's an amazing start for a project with clients that we just released. At this point, we've distributed thousands of clients, but most won't report back until they've completed ten blocks. I expect the rate to have a huge increase in the next few hours as clients start submitting their first blocks.
Daniel
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Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
I've put a rate clock up for this contest. It refreshes every two minutes and is continually updated by the master keyserver. Stats don't get any more accurate than this...
I am somewhat disappointed that the folks running d.net continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. First, and in my eyes worst, is the fact that they are not able to advertise their contests worth a damn. Take a look at their home page. The announcement of the CSC contest starting is after several paragraphs of numbing boredom, in the same typeface as everything else. Distributed.net needs to learn to use the H1 tag. If they want people to switch their clients, they need a big, flashing siren or something!
The second problem is one that I'm sure a slashdotter with more time than I have will cover more thoroughly here. In short, the clients need to be opened. If you must obfuscate the block authentication scheme, then you have no authentication scheme to speak of. The poor design of d.net client security has been demonstrated by multiple occassions of people faking results. One principle of security is that you should always assume that the attacker knows exactly how your security mechanism works. It would be great if d.net could overcome this problem and harness communal brainpower for testing, bugfixing, and enhancement. Think of open source as a distributed.net for brains :)
-jwb