Re: distributed.net "news"...

I would also include a blurb about the Playstation 3 (aka CellBE) client. They also post some impressive numbers (approx 170Mkeys/s).

--
Ed Wensell III

24/7 support is only available for 3.428571 hours per day.


--- On Thu, 4/23/09, Korey Nixon <[email protected]> wrote:

> From: Korey Nixon <[email protected]>
> Subject: [RC5] distributed.net "news"...
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009, 1:28 PM
> Dear fellow RC5 mailing list
> members,
>  
> I was recently reading
> an article in "Computer Power User" Magazine about
> "charitable computing"  The link to the article
> online is here:  http://www.computerpoweruser.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0903%2F46c03%2F46c03.asp
> 
>  
> Here's a quote from
> the article:
>  
> "In the past,
> researchers often set up volunteer computing programs,
> attracted a base of users, and then forgot to communicate
> with the troops. Now that volunteers can switch their CPU
> time among causes with a single interface, researchers must
> learn to work in a charity marketplace. 'The fact is
> there are people behind those computers, and they need
> reassurance that they aren’t just wasting
> electricity,' says Anderson. One of the challenges for
> volunteer computing projects is having the research teams
> devote time and resources to community cultivation.
> 'Projects attract users by doing good science
> and by having Web sites that have up-to-date news and
> interesting message boards,' he
> says."
> 
>  
> Let's face it - the
> main distributed.net web site
> is out of date!  So I've written some "news"
> for distributed.net. 
> I've even spiced things up a bit by including a fun
> contest at the bottom of the news bulletin.
> 
>  
> I'm sending
> this to the mailing list with the best of intentions,
> because I believe we have an opportunity to attract a
> significant amount of new users, especially with the work
> that has been happening with video card (GPU) based
> clients.  That's why I've taken this step by
> writing some content for distributed.net's web
> site.  I'm sending this to the mailing list first, in
> order to receive some feedback.  If you think this is a
> good idea, please let me know.  Depending on the feedback
> received, I may get in touch with the distributed.net
> administration team to see if they want to use the
> content.
> 
>  
> Please find below the
> content I've written.  Thanks, and happy
> crunching!!!
> 
> 
> _________________
> Distributed.net
> News:
>  
> Greetings!  It is with
> pleasure that we announce some new developments here at distributed.net. 
> Projects RC5-72 and OGR-NG are ongoing, with some exciting
> news for both.
> 
>  
> RC5-72: 
> Current keyrates for RC5-72 are near all time highs.  An
> average of 50 blocks/day has been the norm for some time
> now, compared to the long term average of 33 blocks/day. 
> These high key rates can be attributed to the launch of
> several beta clients which run on Graphics Processing Units,
> or GPUs.  On the pre-release client page you can find betas
> for both NVIDIA and ATI based video cards.  These clients
> are only capable of participating in the RC5-72 project at
> present.  The key rates are very high, as the GPUs of today
> are much better suited to process RC5-72 work units than
> CPUs are.
> 
>  
> We encourage beta
> testers, so head on over to the pre-release page
> <link> and download your client today.
> To use these clients,
> the following hardware is required at minimum:
>  
> NVIDIA video
> cards:    Minimum GeForce 8xxx series
> ATI video
> cards:        Minimum Radeon HD 2xxx series
> 
>  
> So, just how fast will
> these clients perform?  To use NVIDIA cards as an example:
> With the entry level (8600) series GeForce cards, you can
> expect roughly 70 million keys/sec or roughly 1,400
> blocks/day.
> 
> With the higher end
> cards (GTX 285) you can expect upwards of 500 million
> keys/sec, or roughly 10,000 blocks/day.
>  
> ATI cards have
> similarly impressive numbers.  And don't forget -
> despite RSA security discontinuing the official sponsorship
> of the RC5-72 project, there still is prize money
> available!  distributed.net has picked
> up RSA's slack and will provide the winner with US $2000
> if a single participant, or US $1000 if on a team, with the
> other $1,000 going to the winners' team.
> 
>  
> We encourage you to
> recruit more CPUs and especially GPUs to participate in the
> RC5-72 project.  Together, we can wrap the project up
> before we all know it - and hey, you might be $2000 richer
> for it!
> 
>  
> OGR-NG:  Thanks
> to an impressive initial support base of participants,
> OGR-27 is already > 1% completed.  We are pleased to
> announce some exciting work being done on new OGR cores,
> which will provide increased node rates.  CPUs that support
> Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE 2) instructions (introduced
> originally in Intel's Pentium 4 processor and still
> present in many CPUs today) will benefit with faster
> speeds.  See Wikipedia's article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2#CPUs_supporting_SSE2 ) on SSE2 to check if your CPU
> supports SSE2 instructions and will benefit from the new
> cores.
> 
>  
> Keep an eye on the
> pre-release page for release candidates containing the SSE2
> optimized cores, and a special thanks to Craig
> Johnston for his coding work.
> 
>  
> CONTEST
>  
> Many of you participate
> in distributed.net's
> projects, but how "hardcore" are you?  Maybe
> you're still crunching RC5-72 on a 386 with no hard
> drive but have rigged in a network card?  Are you?  Send
> us a picture!  We're searching for images of the
> oldest, slowest PC's crunching RC5-72.  Send in the
> system specs along with the image to <user_here>. 
> The winning entry will be posted on our web site.  Of
> course, don't forget to flush in those
> blocks!
> 
>  
> End content
> written.
>  
> 
> -- 
> Korey Nixon
> Halifax, NS Canada
> P:  902-446-5752
> E:  [email protected]
> 
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
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> 


      
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