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.

2010-06-29

mikereed [29-Jun-2010 @ 22:29]

Filed under: clients — Mike Reed @ 22:29 +00:00

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!

2010-06-28

mikereed [28-Jun-2010 @ 13:18]

Filed under: clients — Mike Reed @ 13:18 +00:00

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!

2010-06-27

New website rolled out

Filed under: Uncategorized — bovine @ 04:44 +00:00

We just put our new website infrastructure online a few minutes ago, so you should be able to see it at http://www.distributed.net/ (or possibly once your DNS cache refreshes).

Just like our new blogging system announced last month, the goal of this upgrade was to clean up some of our back-end infrastructure and simplify content updating for us. We’re also preparing to decommission the old server hardware used by our old website, so this was a good opportunity to do it.

This has been a pretty complex migration due to the mix of technologies, pages variations, and supported language translations but almost all of our old URLs should continue to load without disruption. We’re now running MediaWiki with a custom skin and a custom language extension so that we can provide the same experience as the old website. In fact, unless you look carefully you may not even notice any differences!

There will be some more website updates over the next few weeks, so look forward for more announcements soon.

Moo!

2010-05-13

OGR-27 Progress

Filed under: project status — snikkel @ 22:46 +00:00

If you’ve been following our OGR-27 stats you’ll have noticed we just passed through 12% completion. We’re steadily marching forward at rate of approximately one percent a month thanks to our contributors and welcome everyone to join in.

2010-05-09

A bit past due….

Filed under: clients — koremore @ 17:25 +00:00

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

2010-05-08

New blogging system to replace plans

Filed under: Uncategorized — bovine @ 07:47 +00:00

This posting is mostly just a test, but it does have some mild informational value…

We’ve just finished replacing our old home-grown “.plan” file system with a more modern blogging system running on new server hardware. Technically, we stopped serving “finger” requests several years ago, so this isn’t that big of a change. All of the previous posts from our old “.plan” system have been imported and all old URLs should be automatically redirected to their new locations here at http://blogs.distributed.net/

If you subscribe to our RSS feed, then your reader might have re-displayed some older posts when it followed the redirect to its new location. Prior RSS posts are being published with the same “PermaLink guid” so you might not see that issue at all, depending on your reader.

Users that are subscribed to our “plans” mailing list will continue to be able to read new staff blog posts, despite the obsolete name of the list. However, the readability of some new posts there may be impacted by the conversion of HTML to plaintext for that mailing list.

IRC users in our #distributed channel on irc.cuckoo.com should now also be receiving notification of new blog entries instead of plan posts.

Although this blogging system does support user comments, we’ re not going to enable them here quite yet since we are working on some other exciting improvements that would complicate things later.

Hopefully this revamped backend should make it easier for us to make more regular posts to our users. Keep crunchin’!

2010-03-12

chrisj [12-Mar-2010 @ 10:48]

Filed under: stats — chrisj @ 10:48 +00:00

:: 12-Mar-2010 10:48 GMT (Friday) ::

Hi All,

Stats is back online and caught up. The dns record for stats.distributed.net
has been updated and will take effect within the next few hours.

At present, stats is operating in a read-only mode while we perform some
consistency checks. This means that any changes to teams, participant
information, etc is currently unavailable.

Thanks for your co-operation and patience. Moo!

2010-03-10

mikereed [10-Mar-2010 @ 00:28]

Filed under: stats — Mike Reed @ 00:28 +00:00

:: 10-Mar-2010 00:28 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Our stats system is down while we attend to some unscheduled maintenance. We
hope to have it back online shortly.

Thanks for your patience and continued support!

2010-02-19

bovine [19-Feb-2010 @ 23:58]

Filed under: stats — bovine @ 23:58 +00:00

:: 19-Feb-2010 23:58 GMT (Friday) ::

Stats will be a little delayed today and will likely be a little low
because we are currently processing some backlog that occurred today
due to a system outage. Tomorrow’s stats should have the delayed
results. Moo!

2010-01-24

bovine [24-Jan-2010 @ 06:17]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 06:17 +00:00

:: 24-Jan-2010 06:17 GMT (Sunday) ::

We’re having some connectivity issues with our keymaster server, so
our proxy network is currently holding all submitted results until
connectivity is restored. As a result, stats did not run last night.
We hope to get things back in operational order soon. Thanks!

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