12-May-2009 Two new builds are out: 510 (v2.9104) adds 3 faster OGR SSE2 cores (25% difference here), quickly superseded by 511 (v2.9105) which fixes a bug in the PPC OGR core, so please update if you have x86 or PPC machines. See the D.net pre-release page for downloads.
24-Feb-2009 OGR-26 is finished (and OGR-27 has started)! Looks like no ruler was found that is more optimal than the currently known best one, but this lays the foundation for OGR-27 in which it is very likely we will improve on the state of the art. We ended up in 6th place overall, out of 440 teams, with 2.3% of all work done! (which is a nice improvement over the previous 1% range)

Also, you need the build 509 clients (v2.9103) to participate in the OGR-27 project, clients for all Amiga platforms are out on the pre-release page. Client build 507 (v2.9101) will simply exit thinking no more work can be done, so upgrade now. The Distributed Net release concerning the OGR-26 project's successful conclusion:

We've just confirmed receipt of the last OGR-26 stub, thus marking
that project officially complete!  We will try to publish who
submitted the most optimal and last stubs, once we confirm that they
don't mind their identities being revealed.

Due to variations in complexity, we expect that OGR-27 will take us
significantly longer than OGR-26 did.  It is difficult to provide a
precise estimate but one extremely rough guess is about 7 years,
assuming no increase in computing power and that our size estimation
sampling reflects the entire stubspace.

There is one thing that is different with OGR-27 than with our
previous OGR projects: we are confident that we will discover a better
ruler for OGR-27 than the one we know to be optimal currently.

So there you have it, if Moore's Law (and participation) holds, we should have real world improvements to show for several years faster than OGR-25 took, my rough estimate would be in 4 years from now :)

17-Feb-2009 OGR-26 is almost finished, and new clients (build 509) as well as personal proxies (build 347) are out to support OGR-27. Also, the OGR-NG assembly core has been optimized for MMX, which brings a speed boost of up to 42%!
26-Nov-2008 New beta clients are out for Cell BE (OGR-NG) and nVidia CUDA (RC5-72 only), get them at the usual place. Meanwhile, we are doing very well in OGR-26 and have risen to a 4th overall team rank. Over 13% of the work has been completed already, at current rates OGR-26 will be finished in possibly 4 months' time.
02-Nov-2008 Distributed.net now has statistics up for OGR-26 as well, after one week we are ranked 7th :)
30-Oct-2008 The AmigaOS4/PPC client build 507 has been updated (to 507b) since it crashed on non-AltiVec/G4 machines (compiler used AltiVec instructions in general code without checking).
27-Oct-2008 OGR-26 capable pre-release clients (build 571) for various AmigaOS flavours (PPC/68k/OS4/MorphOS) are now available from the pre-release area at d.net.
26-Oct-2008 OGR-25 (phase 2, a.k.a. OGR-P2) has been concluded after a little over 8 years (3006 days to be exact).
The effort continues with OGR-26, which will probably be finished much faster (on the order of OGR-24) thanks to a new algorithm.

The Distributed Amiga team ended up 7th out of 7912 teams, with 1.24% of all work done, an excellent result :)
For the whole course of the project our team consisted of 1103 members, of which the top placed individual Amiga team member was ranked 101st out of 124,387 total project participants (with only two more days that would have been 100 exactly, oh well :).

From the distributed.net .plan announcements:

We have proven conclusively by the exhaustive search of all possible rulers
that the previously predicted 25-mark ruler is indeed the most optimal one.

The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29
39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396
431 459 467 480.  (This ruler may alternatively be expressed in terms
of the distance between those positions, which is how dnetc displays
them: 12-17-10-33-19-...)

This shortest ruler was found by two independent computers. The
initial report was received on October 10th, 2007 and a second,
matching result was returned on March 24th, 2008. However it was not
until the final stub was returned and verified that we could rule out
the possibility of a still-shorter ruler. This final stub was returned
on October 24th, 2008 drawing to a close the complete search of all
possible stubs.  Due to the nature of an exhaustive search,
distributed.net users have also proven that the above solution is
unique (the ruler's mirror notwithstanding).

At the same time, OGR-26 and new clients/proxies were announced:

New clients and proxies will be required to support the new project,
which we are calling "OGR-NG". The new clients will have version
2.9101.507 or higher. Clients with version numbers prior to this will
only be able to work on the RC5-72 project. Similarly, Personal Proxy
version 343 or higher is required. [..]

The OGR node rate for these new clients may appear to be slower than
those for the OGR-25p2 project. This isn't a cause for concern. The
effective search rate for the overall project is actually more
efficient as these new clients are using an improved algorithm. The
new algorithm is named FLEGE (Feiri-Levet Enhanced GARSP Engine). It
has been developed by Didier Levet and Michael Feiri over the course
of the past few months. We are especially grateful to them for this
Herculean effort. In technical terms, the number of elements in the
'choose lookup table' has been increased from 48K to 2M
elements. Although this will slightly increase the size of the dnetc
binary, this optimization will significantly reduce the number of
nodes that we have to search through, sometimes a node improvement of
ten-fold or more.

We estimate that OGR-26 will take much less time to complete than
OGR-25 and will probably be more similar to OGR-24, in terms of
computational effort. Beyond that, we're looking forward to OGR-27 and
OGR-28 because the current solutions to at least one of the two is
very likely not optimal. OGR-26 is on the way and must be done first
since higher-order rulers depend on the proven optimality of previous
ones.
01-Sep-2008 It looks like the OGR-25 project, which has been going for 8 years and a month now, is going to be finished in 5 days or so (currently at 94.94% with around 1% a day progress), according to the status overview page. I strongly suggest flushing any large buffers you have remaining now :)

In other news, the project's 11th anniversary (August 20th) quietly passed by. After finishing OGR-25 d.net will most likely move on to OGR-26 and keep RC5-72 as long term 'parking' effort. Presumably new clients will be needed for OGR-26, we'll keep you posted.

02-Apr-2008 Depending on platform, build 503 to 505 clients are out (well, for 2 months now :), amongst others with slightly faster OGR MMX cores and a stable PS3 Cell core.
20-Aug-2007 The Distributed Amiga effort is 10 years old! :) Happy birthday and thanks to all the participants and contributors of the past decade. What began as a gettogether between a couple of IRC regulars grew out to a several thousand participant strong effort. Although Amiga's star has been steadily falling for the past decade, the community has proven to be resilient and hopeful, in some cases alive and kicking, as our rankings in the Distributed.net projects still show. So keep up the good work and to another decade of Amiga, if not in body then in spirit :) No special festivities are planned at the moment due to the usual lack of time, but if you have a good idea, let us know.

Another major newsitem: the build 502 client (again two week limited beta) is out for the Playstation 3's "Cell Broandband Engine" CPU and introduces an optimized OGR core which reaches an awesome 230 Mnodes/s using all cores. For comparison, that's around 30% faster than a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad (using all 4 cores), which is clock for clock probably the fastest general purpose CPU around at the moment. If you have a PS3 and run Linux on it, this needs to be on there :)

11-Aug-2007 Since the holiday period no less than three new clients are out for some platforms (not Amiga): build 499 brings slightly faster OGR-P2 speeds (1-3%) and build 500 is supposed to speed up RC5-72 a little (but beware as I saw it selecting the wrong (much slower) core on various Pentium 4 machines).

Build 501 is a time limited (two weeks) beta client for the Cell processor found in the Playstation 3, it reaches a screaming 170 Mkeys/s on RC5-72 and will gain a hopefully similarly awesome OGR core in the next release. If you have a Playstation 3 (probably requires Linux to run) keep an eye on this. All new clients can be downloaded from the usual locations at distributed.net (official releases and pre-release clients).

24-May-2007 RSA Labs have terminated the RC5 Secret-Key Challenge. Apparently they do not see further use in the challenge, having proven several times that a determined adversary can crack most mainstream encryption keylengths of the time (specifically DES 56 bit several times, RC5 in keylenghts of 40, 48, 56 and 64 bit). With this the RSA Secret-Key Challenge has ended, although Distributed.Net are planning a vote on whether they should continue alone (this seems unlikely though). Distributed Amiga ended up 7th out of 4,768 teams, having done ~1% of the work (although only 0.416% of the entire keyspace was searched).

Again, you are encouraged to switch to OGR-P2, which is still active and will continue as before. Unless you made the client do only RC5, it should automatically switch over once it runs out of buffers - if D.Net decide to drop RC5 as well.

05-May-2007 Paul Caple has grabbed the Distributed Amiga member list for the THINK/Ligandfit cancer research project when he read it would close and volunteered it by mail after reading the previous news item, the list has been linked from the member stats page. Thanks Paul!
30-Apr-2007 The United Devices/Grid.org THINK/Ligandfit cancer research project has been concluded. After six years enough data has been passed through the distributed computing effort for further analysis by (amongst others) the university of Oxford:

On Friday, April 27, 2007, Grid.org announced it has completed its mission to demonstrate the viability and benefits of large-scale Internet-based grid computing, and will be retiring its famous efforts to support critical health research. Grid.org was the largest and most ambitious public interest grid venture ever attempted, and thanks to Grid.org and its millions of members, dozens of similar global grid projects have been able to catch on and succeed by following its footsteps.

Facts and Figures

  • As of April 2007, Grid.org managed 3,732,696 global devices, with 1,340,913 registered members who contributed 210 years of CPU time daily
  • Grid.org's top 5 teams have nearly 100,000 members combined
  • Our top 5 all-time teams (by CPU hours contributed):
    • Team 2ch, created 4/5/2001 with over 40,000 years of CPU time donated
    • Easynews, created 2/2/2002 with over 27,000 years of CPU time donated
    • Team Discovery, created 4/5/2001 with nearly 4000 years of CPU time donated
    • Vulture Central II, created 4/3/2001 with over 3000 years of CPU time donated
    • Dutch Power Cows against cancer, created 4/3/2001 with over 3000 years of CPU time donated

For the final Distributed Amiga team statistics, see the effort stats page. Unfortunately team breakdown is no longer available, and I have no member list saved from this project. Nevertheless, thanks to all participants, you have helped research on a cure against cancer advance. It is unclear how the data compiled is going to be made available to the general public, hopefully more information will be provided through the United Devices website.

With the conclusion of the non-profit effort, it is highly recommended to uninstall the UD client and focus on OGR-25 (a.k.a. OGR-P2).

28-Jan-2007 If you're looking for some nice graphed statistics that update once an hour, check out Reflect's statistics pages. Note that in order to appear on them you have to reconfigure your proxy settings (making it a single point of failure, but for those of you checking stats often this should not be a problem).
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