distributed.net is one of the many websites participating in the International IPv6 day. On June 8 2011 starting at 00:00 UTC, we will have AAAA records listed in our DNS for www.distributed.net. Stats and our keyservers will not be affected during this event. For most people you should have no problems continuing to access our website. For further details, check out http://www.worldipv6day.org/
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.
2011-06-07
2011-04-11
OGR-27 client issues
Dear friends,
We are pleased to announce that we have recently identified and fixed some bugs in our OGR client codebase. One of them causes the client to skip part of a packet in very rare cases. It can happen only in OGR-27 and above, so previous projects were not affected. Fixes are included in our updated client, v2.9109.518.
Due to the severity of this bug, we decided to change the rules for stub verification. Now not only two returned results must have the same node count, but also at least one of the results must be returned by a fixed (.518) client. Thus we will be sure that no rulers were skipped. Since we have not started the second pass of OGR-27.4 yet, this is an ideal time to introduce a validation change like this.
We’re asking you to update all of your systems to the fixed client, v2.9109.518, as soon as possible. Results sent from older clients will still be accepted and counted in stats. Updating to the latest client will help us to complete the project faster.
The updated client also recognizes the new Intel Core i3 and AMD Phenom processors, which are becoming increasingly popular among budget-conscious consumers.
You can download the updated client for all major platforms at: http://www.distributed.net/Download_clients.
We thank you for your continued participation in this ground-breaking project.
Moo!
2011-04-02
New 64-bit clients available for testing
We have new Windows and Solaris 64-bit pre-release clients available for early-adopter testing on http://www.distributed.net/Download_prerelease
The v2.9110.519 release includes two new 64-bit RC5-72 cores that offer an exciting speed improvement. We’ll be working to get the pre-release binaries available some additional platforms soon. As always, please report any bugs you find at http://bugs.distributed.net/
2011-03-12
New v2.9109.518 clients released
We’ve moved a number of new clients to our official release page:
- AmigaOS [PPC/PowerUp] v2.9109.518
- AmigaOS [m68k] v2.9109.518
- AmigaOS [PPC/OS4] v2.9109.518
- AmigaOS [PPC/WarpOS] v2.9109.518
- Solaris/SunOS [10.x/amd64] v2.9109.518b
- FreeBSD [8.x/sparc64] v2.9109.518
- Linux [AMD64/Stream] v2.9109.518
- Linux [AMD64/ELF] v2.9109.518
- Linux [x86/Stream] v2.9109.518
- Linux [CellBE] v2.9109.518b
- OS/2 [x86] v2.9109.518
- Mac OS X/Darwin [x86/CUDA-3.1] v2.9109.518
- Mac OS X/Darwin [AMD64] v2.9109.518
- Mac OS X/Darwin [x86] v2.9109.518
- PC-DOS, MS-DOS [x86] v2.9109.518
- Windows 64bit [AMD64] v2.9109.518
- Windows 32bit [x86/Zipped] v2.9109.518
- Windows 32bit [x86/Stream] v2.9109.518
- Windows 32bit [x86/Installer] v2.9109.518
- Windows 32bit [x86/CUDA-3.1] v2.9109.518
You can download all of these clients from http://www.distributed.net/Download_clients
A changelog of all of the fixes and features in this new version is available at http://http.distributed.net/pub/dcti/current-client/CHANGES.txt
2011-02-27
New source code updates
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! ![]:8)](https://blogs.distributed.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_tinycow.png){kind=icon}
2010-12-29
Wrapping up 2010
Dear friends,
With 2010 coming to an end, we thought this would be a good time to review the tremendous progress we’ve made this year, particularly on the RC5-72 front.
Modern video cards now typically include highly advanced parallel processors that can sometimes be used for general purpose computing. Although only certain types of tasks are currently suitable for GPU acceleration, we’ve found that RC5 falls happily in that category.
We began beta testing our first GPU-based clients for nVidia CUDA and ATI Stream in January and February 2009, respectively. Public testing of the GPU clients continued for about a year until we officially released both the CUDA and Stream clients in January 2010.
Adoption of the new GPU clients has been very successful throughout 2010, due in part to the folks at DNETC@Home. At this moment, about 86% of our incoming completed RC5-72 results come from Stream clients, 5% from CUDA, and 7% from traditional x86 processors.[1] Another exciting milestone is that the overall total results ever received for the RC5-72 project, results from Stream/Win32 are extremely close to surpassing those received from X86/Win32, despite the nearly 7 year lead before the official release of GPU clients.[2]
RC5-72 keyrate for 2009-2010
At the end of 2009, our overall RC5-72 project keyrate was about 250 GKeys/sec. Our current project rate is now about 1.5 TKeys/sec, or about 6 times faster than last year!
If we started RC5-56 right now (which took us 250 days in 1997), and found the key in the same place as last time, it would take us about 18 hours to complete. If we had to check the entire keyspace… it would be a little longer–perhaps 38 hours!
In the coming year, we hope to announce some other exciting developments which should continue to push the performance and awareness of distributed computing.
If you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow us on @dnetc!
Happy Moo Year!
2010-12-28
A near-miss (or perhaps a near-hit?)
Dear friends,
We recently received the first true “false positive” work unit of the RC5-72 project. These are a rare find.
In the interests of client speed, only the first “block” of the encrypted text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it’s possible for a key which isn’t the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn’t decrypt the text, it does yield a plaintext which matches “The unkn” for the first eight bytes.
The decrypt of the packet was “The unkn…O.k.V>..3W.R..lW.]*e.sc.:-…..u…..cN.&.0.N.” The lucky participant is known as 門村 (“Gate Village”) and will be receiving a T-shirt from us soon. He is a researcher in Japan running dnetc on a Windows system with a Stream client.
As some participants may recall, we also identified a similar ‘false positive’ during the previous RC5-64 project. Finding these are exciting because they help to validate that the project is working properly and is still on track to find the real solution.
It also represents an interesting datapoint regarding the RC5 algorithm. There’s been much speculation and napkin scribbling on just how frequently such false positives might present themselves. The general consensus seemed to be that such an occurrence is extremely improbable. A brute-force search is really the only way to conclusively determine the likelihood of such false positives.
Keep on crunching!
2010-12-18
New clients released
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.
2010-12-12
website backend upgraded
The mediawiki backend on www.distributed.net has been upgraded to the latest version. Let us know if you see any breakage.
2010-11-27
new stats servers now online
After several weeks of anticipation, we’ve finished deploying our new stats servers and have fully transferred operations to them. The two new machines (standard and deviation) should be able to provide us with sufficient capacity and reliability for the foreseeable future. You can check out a picture of standard and deviation in our photo gallery. Full hardware specs on our current and past servers are also listed on the statsbox FAQ page. Our old server, fritz, has been physically relocated offsite and is awaiting a disk wipe before we decide its final fate.
Stats should again be available at http://stats.distributed.net/ No loss of data occurred during this server transition.
We’d also like to thank Midas Networks in Austin, Texas for continuing to provide excellent hosting services to us.
Thanks for your attention!