Dear friends,
We hope that you celebrated a happy holiday season and saw the new year in with friends and family wherever you may be.
Another year passes… but we press on. OGR-28 is almost in touching distance. Perhaps by the end of next year, we will have completed it. You can help bring that day closer by telling your friends to help us out. :)
We have made great progress during the year by working together. Friends and strangers, enthusiasts all, from the four corners of the globe in pursuit of a common goal.
On the OGR-28 project, we are making great strides through the second pass, with more than 387 million stubs (out of 524 million) checked once and 50 million verified. We recently re-opened the 8th stub space.
On the RC5-72 project, we check more than 21 million blocks every day. Perhaps we shall reach 5% of all work completed within a month. Graphics cards now exist which can process 5 Gigakeys per second. For comparison, the overall rate of our network back when we were working on the RC5-64 project was 102 Gigakeys per second. Our current network speed processing RC5-72 is over 1.2 Terakeys per second!
We continue to look for ways to optimise our client software; some of the newer GPU clients are increasingly I/O-bound, so we will be releasing new versions with increased buffer sizes for them shortly.
Our friend Sunset has recently created a new core for RC5-72 on ARM64 which is almost 5 times quicker than our existing core. If you have a Raspberry Pi 3 or a Cavium Thunder X2 system, you can make use of it.
We are always on the look out for new projects which we can lend our expertise and experience to. If you have a project in mind or some code to hand, please let us know.
We already experienced our first “megaflush” of the year; 6 million blocks in one day. We like to encourage participation, but would like to remind everyone that holding blocks for extended periods of time can cause wasted, duplicated work to be done by other participants if we happen to need to recycle work for another pass.
Moo!