:: 30-Jun-2005 06:41 GMT (Thursday) ::
New clients have been released and can be downloaded from
http://www.distributed.net/download/ Users running any previous x86
client versions are encouraged to update.
Included with client version 2.9010.495 and higher are some exciting
speed improvements. Three new RC5-72 cores have been added, including
a new 64-bit core for AMD64 and two existing x86 RC5-72 cores have
been sped up. In addition a new OGR core has been added that provides
an approximate 30% improvement. We are eternally grateful for our
contributors’ ingenuity.
OGR25-P2 is progressing well. We have now checked over 47.66% of all
work in the first of nine sub-phases. Overall we have completed 7.66%
of OGR25-P2. For more information about the sub-phases look here:
http://faq.distributed.net/cache/230.html Note that due to an
oversight the last time we updated OGR completion on stats, it has
been showing the percent completion of the first sub-phase. We will be
going back to displaying overall completion, since this is what most
users are interested in.
A few minor issues with the clients have been corrected as well. The
‘dg3’, ‘sgp3’, and ‘snjl’ cores present in versions prior to
2.9010.495 miscalculate a small number of predictable keys in every
block, rendering some blocks containing those keys discarded for
stats. These cores were used as the default choice for 32-bit clients
running on Cyrix Cx486, AMD K5, Via C3 Nehemiah, Pentium 4, Pentium M
and 64-bit clients running on the AMD64/Intel EM64T processors.
Note that at most only 2% of the calculated keys within each block
processed by those cores are affected. This won’t affect the normal
running of the project in any way as we’ll re-process these keys if
needed.
All current x86 clients need to be upgraded to prevent the amount of
work that would need to be recalculated from growing. This also means
that all RC5-72 work from x86 clients v2.9001.474 up to v2.9009.494
(all clients released to date) will stopped being credited at a future
date.
In the past few months, a growing minority of participants have chosen
to try to cheat their way to higher stats rankings by making binary
alterations to our clients. Fortunately, great progress has been made
on both removing the largest users of these hacked clients and
implementing automatic filtering techniques to block future tainted
work.
Cheaters are removed from stats manually after intensive study of
their flushing patterns, to prevent users that tested such clients and
accidentally submitted a few blocks from being removed. Due to the
amount of manual work involved with this, a few smaller accounts may
still face removal in the near future.
We thank you for all of your contributions and hope that you will
stick with us into the future as we continue to make history. :)
