Dear friends,
With 2010 coming to an end, we thought this would be a good time to review the tremendous progress we’ve made this year, particularly on the RC5-72 front.
Modern video cards now typically include highly advanced parallel processors that can sometimes be used for general purpose computing. Although only certain types of tasks are currently suitable for GPU acceleration, we’ve found that RC5 falls happily in that category.
We began beta testing our first GPU-based clients for nVidia CUDA and ATI Stream in January and February 2009, respectively. Public testing of the GPU clients continued for about a year until we officially released both the CUDA and Stream clients in January 2010.
Adoption of the new GPU clients has been very successful throughout 2010, due in part to the folks at DNETC@Home. At this moment, about 86% of our incoming completed RC5-72 results come from Stream clients, 5% from CUDA, and 7% from traditional x86 processors.[1] Another exciting milestone is that the overall total results ever received for the RC5-72 project, results from Stream/Win32 are extremely close to surpassing those received from X86/Win32, despite the nearly 7 year lead before the official release of GPU clients.[2]
RC5-72 keyrate for 2009-2010
At the end of 2009, our overall RC5-72 project keyrate was about 250 GKeys/sec. Our current project rate is now about 1.5 TKeys/sec, or about 6 times faster than last year!
If we started RC5-56 right now (which took us 250 days in 1997), and found the key in the same place as last time, it would take us about 18 hours to complete. If we had to check the entire keyspace… it would be a little longer–perhaps 38 hours!
In the coming year, we hope to announce some other exciting developments which should continue to push the performance and awareness of distributed computing.
If you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow us on @dnetc!
Happy Moo Year! ![]:8)](https://blogs.distributed.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_tinycow.png){kind=icon}