Dear friends,
distributed.net is proud to announce the completion of OGR-28 after approximately 8.5 years, with the help from our network of volunteers!
We started our calculations to prove the optimal Golomb ruler with 28 marks in February 2014 just a few days after we proved the optimal one with 27 marks.
While we are a little disappointed that we were not able to find a more optimal one than the previously predicted one, we have proven conclusively using an exhaustive search that it is indeed optimal. That previously known ruler has the following marks: 0 3 15 41 66 95 97 106 142 152 220 221 225 242 295 330 338 354 382 388 402 415 486 504 523 546 553 585
or it can be written in our alternative notation: 28/3-12-26-25-29-2-9-36-10-68-1-4-17-53-35-8-16-28-6-14-13-71-18-19-23-7-32
That known solution was discovered twice by our volunteers. The first time was in March 2015 and then more recently in July 2022. We will be contacting those two people and sending them some nice gifts.
More than 65,000 volunteers from more than 80 countries around the world contributed to this success. We verified 524,091,443 stubs (yes, even the 4 which show on the Stubspace Status page as incomplete) while requiring each to have been completed at least two times independently and with an identical node count.
We don’t have plans to work on OGR-29 at the moment, due to its currently projected size and duration, but we will continue to keep it in mind for the future.
Our RC5-72 project remains very much alive and well. Should you be interested in continuing to help our endeavors, feel free to adjust your clients to work on that project. For many of you, the nostalgia factor of RC5-72 may bring a nice smile to your face! (It’s also quite fun to see how your 2022 hardware fares, compared to your keyrates of old).
We are grateful for all of your contributions. Moo! ![]:8)](https://blogs.distributed.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_tinycow.png){kind=icon}
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.
2022-11-23
Completion of OGR-28 project
2022-11-17
Quick status about OGR-28
This is just a brief note to mention that we are indeed aware that OGR-28 stubs are intentionally no longer being distributed by our keyservers. This is because we have tentatively completed all of the minimum verification needed for the project, but we are still continuing to accept results from clients that still had pending work.
We will be posting a longer announcement soon, but we are working to finalize some details about the project so that we can include them in the announcement. Until then, feel free to allow your clients to continue working on RC5-72, if that appeals to you. Thanks again for your patience!
2016-11-18
Backend server outages
There was a brief unplanned outage of the keymaster for about 8 hours earlier today, but the network is in the process of catching up right now and should be back to normal soon.
There will also be a planned outage of the stats server for this weekend due to building maintenance needing to service the air conditioning. Once service is restored on Monday, the stats server will again catch up.
We do not expect there to have been any significant loss of data or stats credit as a result of these events.
Thanks for your patience!
2015-07-22
Keymaster temporarily back online
Well, after nearly 12 days we’ve managed to get the old keymaster hardware back online. The problem ended up being some failing RAM, though the symptoms weren’t immediately obvious as that. Although we are currently still operating on the old hardware, we are planning to transition to newer hardware tomorrow. The newer hardware was shipped last week during the outage and is still in the process of being racked and powered up.
We do not expect tomorrow’s transition off the old hardware to be externally visible since our proxy network will have caught up and buffered enough work for the brief outage. Stats will have a multi-day gap during the time we were offline, but we expect that the statistics totals for 2015-07-22 will reflect a significantly higher-than-normal amount of work due to all of the backlogged data that had been buffered.
Additional measures are being made to ensure that an outage of this duration does not happen again.
Thanks again for your patience!
2015-07-10
Keymaster interruption again
We are experiencing another hardware issue with our central keymaster, and we do not yet have an estimate for it to be brought back online. However, our proxy network will continue to buffer completed work until the keymaster can be brought back online. Stats will also be delayed until that occurs. More information will be posted as it becomes available. Thanks for your patience!
2015-05-17
Keymaster interruption
We experienced some hardware issues with our keymaster server today, possibly due to a mechanical issue. It had a few hours of downtime on 2015-05-16 causing work to become backlogged and buffered on our keyserver network, which means that the stats for that day will be significantly lower than usual, however tomorrow’s stats should include all of that backlogged work. Newly submitted work is continuing to be processed without delay at this point.
Although the keymaster is back online for the moment, we are continuing to do remote hardware diagnostics. It sounds likely that we may need to replace a system case fan however. Thanks for your patience and support!
2015-04-10
Stats maintenance [resolved]
We’re currently in the process of doing some backend database, webserver, and OS upgrades to our stats servers, so we’ve temporarily disabled access to it until we’re done. Once we’ve verified that everything appears to be working, we’ll brings the stats pages back online. No project data will be lost during this maintenance, and we’ll restart stats processing once it’s done. Thanks for your patience.
Update: This maintenance has now been completed and everything is back to normal.
2014-05-12
Stats server move completed
two rackmount servers, one rackmount UPS, and two dozen donuts being transported to a new home
standard and deviation, before the move
As previously announced, we had to move our stats servers to a new hosting location due to changes at our old hosting provider. Logistically it was quickest and easiest for us to simply physically move the two servers to their new location in Houston, so we completed that move today. Zone file entries have been updated, so http://stats.distributed.net/ should now take you to the new location once any cached DNS entries have been propagated.
The downtime was a little longer than planned because of an unexpected routing failure that began at our old location earlier than our planned start of the move. We also waited until stats has fully processed all of its backlog before officially publicizing its new IP address at its new location.
Part of the transport occurred by private plane, and although the outbound flight was tracked on FlightAware, the return flight was unfortunately not publicly visible due to an air traffic control limitation.
No dnetc work submitted during the downtime was lost, and our stats pages should now fully reflect the last day of work.
2014-05-10
Stats server downtime for relocation
Our stats server is currently offline as we prepare it for relocation. We expect it to be back online tomorrow around 2014-05-11 at about 22:00 UTC but it is possible that we may need to delay its restart time.
During the downtime we will be physically relocating our servers 160 miles, from Austin, TX to a new hosting location in Houston, TX offered by FlightAware. Part of the transport will be conducted by private plane, which might be visible on the FlightAware flight tracking website around 2014-05-11 at 17:00 UTC.
We’d like to thank Midas Green Tech in Austin, TX for the use of their hosting facilities over the years, but their business is transitioning away from physical hosting and towards virtual hosting so our move was an unfortunate necessity. If you are in need of any cloud hosted services, we encourage you to check out their offerings and mention that you heard about them from distributed.net
As always, all dnetc work transmitted during the downtime will be fully counted once our stats website is brought back online.
2014-01-22
OGR-27 project almost completed
We’re very close being able to declare OGR-27 finished, but we have just a few more stubs remaining before final completion. The previous stubspaces 27.1, 27.2, and 27.3 are now officially complete. We expect the last results in 27.4 to be received some time in the next two weeks, and then hope to begin sending out the first OGR-28 stubs within a few hours after that.
As a reminder, no new dnetc client binaries or configuration will be necessary since all existing OGR-27 (OGR-NG) clients are already capable of working on OGR-28 once we begin sending out those workunits.
Look forward to us making another blog post containing some final statistics about OGR-27 within the next two weeks!
(edit: a previous version of this post had some overly optimistic dates)