If you’ve been following our OGR-27 stats you’ll have noticed we just passed through 12% completion. We’re steadily marching forward at rate of approximately one percent a month thanks to our contributors and welcome everyone to join in.
staff blogs
distributed.net staff keep (relatively) up-to-date logs of their activities in .plan files. These were traditionally available via finger, but we've put them on the web for easier consumption.
2010-05-13
2010-05-09
A bit past due….
Greetings everyone. I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce myself. My real name is Korey, and I’m one of distributed.net’s newer staffers. I’m going to be doing a lot of what I’m doing now – communicating with you, our users. Our new blogging system makes it quick and easy for the d.net crew to fire off updates about our projects. So expect more from me.
One thing I’d like to share with you now is some exciting news about out RC5-72 project. If you haven’t taken a good look at that project in a while, have a glance at it now. I’m sure you will notice something very different as of late – higher keyrates. What do we have to thank for that? In a nutshell, GPU based clients. That’s right, the ability to run the distributed.net client on video cards. Currently, several NVIDIA based and ATI/AMD based cards are supported. Client’s for use on video cards are available on our pre-release page.
As always, pre-release clients could have a bug or two, so if you find something, be sure to report it using Bugzilla.
So just how fast are these GPU based clients? FAST. For example, an ATI HD 5870 video card is able to crunch over 1.8 billion keys/second. Yes, I said billion. With a B. A high end CPU, say an Intel core i7, would be lucky to get 80 million keys/sec. And that’s on the high side of an estimate.
So, if you’re willing, head on over to our pre-release page, and download one of the GPU based clients.
Your continued support of distributed.net’s efforts is always appreciated; keep crunching!
-koremore
2010-05-08
New blogging system to replace plans
This posting is mostly just a test, but it does have some mild informational value…
We’ve just finished replacing our old home-grown “.plan” file system with a more modern blogging system running on new server hardware. Technically, we stopped serving “finger” requests several years ago, so this isn’t that big of a change. All of the previous posts from our old “.plan” system have been imported and all old URLs should be automatically redirected to their new locations here at http://blogs.distributed.net/
If you subscribe to our RSS feed, then your reader might have re-displayed some older posts when it followed the redirect to its new location. Prior RSS posts are being published with the same “PermaLink guid” so you might not see that issue at all, depending on your reader.
Users that are subscribed to our “plans” mailing list will continue to be able to read new staff blog posts, despite the obsolete name of the list. However, the readability of some new posts there may be impacted by the conversion of HTML to plaintext for that mailing list.
IRC users in our #distributed channel on irc.cuckoo.com should now also be receiving notification of new blog entries instead of plan posts.
Although this blogging system does support user comments, we’ re not going to enable them here quite yet since we are working on some other exciting improvements that would complicate things later.
Hopefully this revamped backend should make it easier for us to make more regular posts to our users. Keep crunchin’! ![]:8)](https://blogs.distributed.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_tinycow.png){kind=icon}