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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.
:: 29-Nov-2009 06:15 GMT (Sunday) ::
Our keymaster is now back to normal operations and OGR-NG is sending
and receiving work again. We don’t think very many results, if any,
were lost as a result of the outage. The cause of the power failure
is still being investigated. Keep on crunching! ![]:8)](https://blogs.distributed.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_tinycow.png){kind=icon}
:: 28-Nov-2009 19:48 GMT (Saturday) ::
There was a UPS or related power failure at our keymaster that caused
some data inconsistency in our OGR-NG database. As a result, the
project was automatically suspended until manual validation of the
database can be completed.
We hope to be able to bring OGR-NG back online within a day if
everything goes well. Unfortunately, some OGR-NG results that were
returned during this inconsistent period may have been lost.
Meanwhile, RC5-72 is continuing to run and is unaffected. Thanks for
your patience and support!
:: 29-Oct-2009 20:46 GMT (Thursday) ::
Our statsbox should be back online and the hardware upgrade is
complete. No work was lost while it was offline, and it has fully
caught up with the backlog.
For those who are interested in the details: It had a failing
redundant power unit and the closest replacement I could find was a
used power supply designed for a larger 4U case from the same
manufacturer on eBay. Although I couldn’t use the whole power supply,
I believed I could use its newer revision power units if I swapped the
power connectors and faceplates from the failed unit and jumpered an
unnecessary switch connection. Fortunately this worked. I also took
the opportunity replace to a failing case fan, re-seat all power and
drive cables, do a burn in, and upgrade its FreeBSD from 6.2-PRE to
6.4-STABLE. Maybe we’ll move to 7.2 sometime!
Thanks for your patience and continued support!
:: 27-Oct-2009 20:29 GMT (Tuesday) ::
Our statsbox is temporarily down while we perform some minor hardware
upgrades. We hope to bring it back online by tomorrow. Thanks for
your patience!
:: 27-Jul-2009 23:26 GMT (Monday) ::
Howdy folks,
We’ve just transferred some new clients from the pre-release page to the
official release page: http://www.distributed.net/download/clients.php
*dnetc511-amigaos-68k.lha
*dnetc511-amigaos-ppc-pup.lha
*dnetc511-amigaos-ppc-wos.lha
*dnetc511-amigaos-ppc.lha
*dnetc511-morphos-ppc.lha
*dnetc511b-dos-x86.zip
*dnetc511b-linux-cellbe.tar.gz
*dnetc511b-linux-ppc.tar.gz
*dnetc511b-macosx-ppc.tar.gz
*dnetc511b-macosx-x86.tar.gz
*dnetc511b-os2-x86.zip
*dnetc511b-win32-x86.zip
*dnetc511b-win32-x86-setup.msi
*dnetc510-linux-x86-elf-uclibc.tar.gz
As mentioned in a previous plan, these new x86 clients contain three
new OGR cores. Depending on your CPU type, the new cores may provide a
significant speed improvement over the cores used in previous client
versions.
Additionally we strongly recommend that users of OGR PowerPC clients
version 2.9103 or 2.9104 upgrade to these newer versions. It was
discovered that those two specific version numbers could process
OGR-27 blocks incorrectly, so results from those client versions have
been blocked. Users of PowerPC platforms should upgrade to client
version 2.9105.511 or later.
We have also promoted the following personal proxy binaries from the
pre-release page to the official release page:
*proxyper347-freebsd4-x86.tar.gz
*proxyper347-freebsd6-x86.tar.gz
*proxyper347-freebsd7-x86.tar.gz
*proxyper347-linux-cellbe.tar.gz
*proxyper347a-linux-x86-uclibc.tar.gz
We’re very close to being able to finally mark the first three
stubspaces for OGR-27 complete… The first one (OGR-27.1) was just
finished up in the last few hours. There are just a very small number
of stubs that we are waiting to be completed in OGR-27.2 and OGR-27.3.
We’ll make another announcement when those are finally received.
Keep on crunching!
:: 27-Jul-2009 03:02 GMT (Monday) ::
Dear friends,
We have discovered our nVidia CUDA clients prior to v2.9105.512 had a
problem that would cause RC5-72 results to skip part of the
block. This issue turned out to be caused by a bug in the CUDA
compiler itself, which was fixed beginning in the CUDA 2.2 SDK. Going
forward we will only be releasing clients for CUDA version 2.2 and
higher.
The fixed behavior unfortunately reveals that new CUDA clients will be
about half the speed of the older buggy CUDA versions. We understand
that the apparent speed decrease will seem disappointing, but it’s
important to note the earlier speeds were not measuring useful
work. Going forward, speed comparisons should only be made with CUDA
2.2 or higher speeds, as these are the “correct” speeds. Also, please
remember the CUDA clients are still much faster than traditional CPU
clients.
If you are still running a CUDA beta client, we encourage you to
update to the current versions available on our pre-release page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php Results returned by
any earlier clients will no longer be accepted by our keymaster. Users
with prior stats credit from affected clients will not be
retroactively removed.
Due to aspects of our network communication protocol, we are not able
to remotely shutdown only the older, buggy, CUDA clients so we will be
implementing a method to send large, dummy blocks to older CUDA
clients instead.
Since all dnetc CUDA versions released so far have only been “beta”
clients with built-in expiration dates, the impact should be
contained. The last round of beta CUDA clients would have expired at
approximately the end of August 2009.
Thanks again to all of our beta testers that have been helping us
validate this exciting new technology.
:: 27-Apr-2009 23:52 GMT (Monday) ::
There was an unexpected power interruption that caused some of today’s
stats totals to report a little lower than expected. Tomorrow’s stats
should hopefully include most of the queued results that missed the
deadline for stats processing. Thanks!
:: 12-Mar-2009 22:12 GMT (Thursday) ::
There was an unplanned network outage earlier today that caused the
unavailability of our website and DNS services. No work should have
been lost, due to the buffering nature of our network. We will be
working on improving the redundancy of our DNS over the next couple of
days to avoid that part of the problem in the future.
Additionally, we are aware that the historical stats for OGR-26 are
currently not displaying accurate data. During the enablement of
OGR-27 stats, some data archive tables were inadvertently truncated.
We will be working on re-loading those historical OGR-26 stats from
archive logs over the next week.
In other news, if you happen to be attending the South By Southwest
festival in Austin, Texas next week you should feel free to stop by
the Nuclear Taco Night event on Monday March 16 from 6-9 PM. A few of
the distributed.net staff will be working behind the skillets to serve
these extremely spicy tacos to anyone masochistic enough for them:
http://community.livejournal.com/nucleartacos/43420.html
Moo
:: 24-Feb-2009 17:26 GMT (Tuesday) ::
Howdy all,
We’ve just confirmed receipt of the last OGR-26 stub, thus marking
that project officially complete! We will try to publish who
submitted the most optimal and last stubs, once we confirm that they
don’t mind their identities being revealed.
You should already notice that fresh OGR-27 stubs are already
available on our proxy network. To work on this project, you will
need to be using the v2.9103 client for your architecture. If you run
a personal proxy, you should upgrade to build 347. As usual, you can
find them http://www.distributed.net/download/
If your platform doesn’t appear to have released clients available
yet, that may be because some are still on the pre-release page–we
hope to officially release them in the next couple of days. We
appreciate your patience.
Due to variations in complexity, we expect that OGR-27 will take us
significantly longer than OGR-26 did. It is difficult to provide a
precise estimate but one extremely rough guess is about 7 years,
assuming no increase in computing power and that our size estimation
sampling reflects the entire stubspace.
There is one thing that is different with OGR-27 than with our
previous OGR projects: we are confident that we will discover a better
ruler for OGR-27 than the one we know to be optimal currently.
So get your clients cracking! Thanks again for your participation!
Moo
:: 19-Feb-2009 05:51 GMT (Thursday) ::
Stats were not updated today, due to some work to physically relocate
part of our backend network infrastructure. No stats credit will be
lost–all results are being queued and will be credited as soon as
we can. Thanks for your patience!