We’ve made a new public source code tarball available today.  Notably, this new tarball contains the ATI/AMD Stream cores for RC5-72, which are in the clients currently on our pre-release page.  You can download the new tarball from: http://www.distributed.net/Source

We now have also started making available our public CVS repositories on Github, to make it easier for contributors to access our source.  We’re going to be looking at what other parts of our infrastructure are suitable for releasing in the future.  You can find our Github organization here: https://github.com/dcti

Keep on crunching! 

Several new client versions were promoted to released status today, for a detailed list consult the list of client updates by release date. As always, updating to a more recent client release brings with it performance and usability improvements as well as bug fixes. Consult the most recent changelog for a list of the changes that have occurred. (Check the changelog included with each client for an exact list of changes included.)

For those who want to help with testing the latest and greatest, please peruse the list of prerelease clients available.

Thanks all for the contributions and happy holidays.

It has come to our attention that a problem exists with some of the nVidia CUDA systems running on the Windows operating system. The CUDA system already released is up to version 3.1, while our dnetc application only supports up to CUDA 2.2.

If your graphics driver is designed for a higher version than this, the application will appear to run normally, but will send us junk results. One way to test if you are running a compatible version is to run ‘dnetc -test’. A working system should pass all of the tests.

When dnetc for CUDA systems loads, it shows a line that begins:- ‘nvcuda.dll Version:’. If the version displayed is 8.17.11.9775, your card will produce junk data (which our stats system will filter).

We hope to release a new version of the dnetc application that will support the CUDA 3.1 drivers soon.

We thank you for your continued support.

Moo!

Howdy folks,

We’ve just transferred some new clients from the pre-release page to the
official release page: Download Clients

Solaris/SunOS [x86]
OpenBSD [x86/ELF]
OpenBSD [AMD64/ELF]
OpenBSD [Sparc64]
NetBSD [Sparc64/ELF]
FreeBSD [7.x/x86/ELF]
FreeBSD [8.x/sparc64]
FreeBSD [6.x/x86/ELF]
Linux [x86/CUDA-2.2]
Linux [AMD64/CUDA-2.2]
Linux [x86/Stream]
Linux [CellBE]
Linux [AMD64/ELF]
Linux [x86/ELF/uclibc]
OS/2 [x86]
Mac OS X/Darwin [x86/CUDA-2.2]
PC-DOS, MS-DOS [x86]
Windows 64bit [AMD64]
Windows 32bit [x86/CUDA-2.2]
Windows 32bit [x86/Zipped]
Windows 32bit [x86/Installer]
Windows 32bit [x86/Stream]

Moo!

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

:: 29-Sep-2009 22:59 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Friends,

We’d like to let our ATI Stream users know that we’ve posted an
updated Stream client beta for Windows. A Linux beta will follow
shortly. As with all our pre-release software, clients can be found at
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php. This version of the client
fixes compatibility issues with Catalyst drivers 9.9. However, there are still
several known issues with this beta. Known issues include:

The Stream client will not be used to its full potential unless
its priority is set =2 or higher. To achieve this, enter the client’s
configuration mode, and go to options 3,3 and change the value to “2”.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) lag is still heavy. While this isn’t an
issue with dedicated crunching systems, if you run the Stream client on your
primary computer, the lag may bother you. As a workaround, use the screen
saver mode to overcome this. A link to directions to enable the screen saver
can be found at the end of this .plan.

Sometimes, upon exiting, the client will not save the work unit currently
being crunched. This is cumbersome if you have been working on a large work
unit, say 64*2^32, as all work will have to be re-processed. As a workaround
here, you can enable the “checkpointing” feature. To do this, enter the
client’s configuration mode, and go to options 2,4 and choose a path and file
name for your checkpoint file.

There are on-going issues related to remote desktop connections to Stream
clients. It has been reported that using third party remote connection
software (VNC) overcomes these issues.

We are working on ironing out the remaining bugs in the Stream client. If you
have software development experience, a compatible ATI Stream video card,
and think you may be able to help with these bugs, please send an E-mail to
help@distributed.net.

We want to thank all of our early adopters for their help testing our
beta clients. Currently, the Stream client produces the fastest key rates
of any desktop hardware component. It is truly an exciting time here at
distributed.net!

Related Links:

* http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php (Pre-release download page)
* http://bugs.distributed.net/show_bug.cgi?id=4222 (Bug for not saving work units)
* http://faq.distributed.net/?file=52 (Information on the checkpoint function)
* http://www.distributed.net/docs/tutor_clients.php#cl_confg (Screen saver set-up instructions)

:: 14-Aug-2009 22:30 GMT (Friday) ::

Dear friends,

We have been testing distributed.net clients for nVidia CUDA-compatible cards
for a while. Several users have noted that they are quicker than standard CPU
clients at processing RC5 packets. Yesterday, CUDA cards contributed about 3%
of the total work processed for the RC5 project. This may appear small, but
over time, it is significant.

At about the same time as nVidia launched the CUDA system, AMD came out with a
competitor which it calls Stream. Thanks to some excellent work by our friend
Sla Chupyatov, we now have a client ready for testing on Stream systems.

If you run Windows 32-bit or Linux and have an AMD R600 or higher
graphics system (HD 2xxx or better) with the Catalyst 9.7 drivers (or
higher) installed, you can help us test it. We are interested to hear
your feedback. Clients are available from our pre-release page at:
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php. Please, continue to report
any bugs or issues to our bug database at: http://bugs.distributed.net/.

We would like to thank all of our dedicated early adopters for helping us with
testing.

PS: In order for your pre-release AMD client to achieve optimal key rates,
the priority should be set to “2” using the built-in configuration menu (3:
Performance related options).

Moo

:: 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.