| 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. | |
| 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 :) |
|
| 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). |
|
| 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. |
|
| 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! | |
| 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
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). |
|
| 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). | |
| Past news section - read here about older news (~177 KB) | |