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