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.

2018-01-08

New Year 2018

Filed under: clients,project status,stats — Mike Reed @ 23:12 +00:00

Dear friends,

We hope that you celebrated a happy holiday season and saw the new year in with friends and family wherever you may be.

Another year passes… but we press on. OGR-28 is almost in touching distance. Perhaps by the end of next year, we will have completed it. You can help bring that day closer by telling your friends to help us out. :)

We have made great progress during the year by working together. Friends and strangers, enthusiasts all, from the four corners of the globe in pursuit of a common goal.

On the OGR-28 project, we are making great strides through the second pass, with more than 387 million stubs (out of 524 million) checked once and 50 million verified. We recently re-opened the 8th stub space.

On the RC5-72 project, we check more than 21 million blocks every day. Perhaps we shall reach 5% of all work completed within a month. Graphics cards now exist which can process 5 Gigakeys per second. For comparison, the overall rate of our network back when we were working on the RC5-64 project was 102 Gigakeys per second. Our current network speed processing RC5-72 is over 1.2 Terakeys per second!

We continue to look for ways to optimise our client software; some of the newer GPU clients are increasingly I/O-bound, so we will be releasing new versions with increased buffer sizes for them shortly.

Our friend Sunset has recently created a new core for RC5-72 on ARM64 which is almost 5 times quicker than our existing core. If you have a Raspberry Pi 3 or a Cavium Thunder X2 system, you can make use of it.

We are always on the look out for new projects which we can lend our expertise and experience to. If you have a project in mind or some code to hand, please let us know.

We already experienced our first “megaflush” of the year; 6 million blocks in one day. We like to encourage participation, but would like to remind everyone that holding blocks for extended periods of time can cause wasted, duplicated work to be done by other participants if we happen to need to recycle work for another pass.

Moo!

2016-11-18

Backend server outages

Filed under: keyservers,stats — bovine @ 20:27 +00:00

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!

2016-08-10

Quick update – 10 August 2016

Filed under: clients,project status,stats — Mike Reed @ 02:18 +00:00

Apologies, it has been a while since I published a blog update. The front page of our web site still has a problem, but we are making progress on our projects. A look at OGR-28: 42,000 participants. 900 days. 31 BILLION (I know!) Gnodes checked. 20% completed. We can still complete it by New Year if each of us gets a few friends to join in!

RC5-72 has been in progress for 5,000 days as I write. There is still a long way to go, with only just over 4% of the work completed. To have the help of 120,000 participants is amazing. Thank you for all of your contributions.

Have you downloaded new dnetc client software lately? There are a raft of improvements in the last couple of versions, including speed-ups on some platforms (the latest came out of pre-release two months ago). Moo!

2016-02-23

2 year OGR-28 anniversary update!

Filed under: project status,stats — Mike Reed @ 22:43 +00:00

Dear friends,

We’re happy to announce a new client software version, 2.9112.521, for all major operating systems. These are available on the pre-release page: https://www.distributed.net/Download_prerelease. We would be happy for you to check them out and give us your feedback! Among the improvements are better GPU support, OpenCL on more platforms, and a new AVX2 core for RC5-72 contributed by Yasuhiro Katsui which runs 3.6x faster than the previous code. If you find any issues, please report them to us at https://bugs.distributed.net/. We expect to move the build 521 clients to release status after a short time.

As of this writing, we have just passed the second anniversary of the OGR-28 project. With over 36,000 contributors from around the world, we have completed more than 14% of the work necessary to prove the Optimal Golomb Ruler with 28 marks. You can track our progress on https://stats.distributed.net/, where we’ve recently restored the popular keyrate graphs, which show changes in our network’s speed over time. This one is for OGR-28: https://stats.distributed.net/keyrate.php?project_id=28

As you might have noticed above, many of our websites are also now available via https. Feel free to update your bookmarks.

We are grateful for all of your contributions. Please tell your friends about our projects, and watch those keyrate graphs go up!

Moo!

2016-01-12

Quick update – January 12 2016

Filed under: project status,stats — Mike Reed @ 23:52 +00:00

Dear friends,

With nearly 35,000 volunteers and 13.38% of the search space completed, we’ve just started on a new OGR range today (8-x) and so daily stubs completed will be higher. We’re still struggling with our web site, but glad that you’re here with us. Keep telling your friends. We need all the help we can get. Moo!

2015-07-22

Keymaster temporarily back online

Filed under: keyservers,stats — bovine @ 02:00 +00:00

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

Filed under: keyservers,stats — bovine @ 04:28 +00:00

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

Filed under: keyservers,stats — bovine @ 02:37 +00:00

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]

Filed under: stats — bovine @ 22:38 +00:00

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

Filed under: stats — bovine @ 01:41 +00:00

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two rackmount servers, one rackmount UPS, and two dozen donuts being transported to a new home

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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.