project suggestions

I posted a message a few months ago suggesting that
distributed.net take a 
break from RC5 and work on some short-term projects. I've
been running 
distributed.net for about a year and it seems like the OGR
project is at 
least making progress, but the RC5 project doesn't look like
it will be 
completed within our lifetimes. Now that the Secret Key
Challenge was 
canceled it really seems pointless. And also it seems like a
waste to have 
the fastest supercomputer consumed for years by a single
cryptography 
challenge.

One thing we could do is help out other distributed
computing projects. 
There are many active cryptography projects that have years
of computing 
ahead of them. But with distributed.net's help, they could
be finished right 
now. Helping other projects would add to distributed.net's
accomplishments, 
prevent distributed.net from having long, uneventful
periods, and help 
recruit new members from other projects.

Below are some examples of current projects that
distributed.net could 
easily complete. I estimated the amount of time that
distributed.net would 
take to complete the projects based on the ratio of clients
per day.

1. The M4 Message Breaking Project is breaking encrypted
messages from 1942. 
The current project started over a year ago and has
completed about 8% of 
the keyspace. distributed.net could finish the keyspace
within a month.
http://www.by
tereef.org/m4_project.html

2. In the trading card game Perplex City, there is a card
with 
distributed.net's cows and an encrypted message. The card
game company is 
offering many prizes for decrypting the message. There is a
distributed 
computing project, the 13th Labour project, that is trying
to decrypt the 
message. The project is 77% complete, but at their current
rate they are 
still facing up to half a year of computing. distributed.net
could finish 
this project in 5 days. If we started now, we would reach
100% by Friday.
http://www.13thlabour.tk/

3. DistrRTgen is building rainbow tables to crack hashes.
Right now there 
are 3936 workunits, but they add new projects each week.
3936 workunits will 
take 6 days for DistrRTgen to complete. distributed.net
could finish the 
whole thing in half an hour!
http://www.freerain
bowtables.com/

Besides cryptography projects, we could maybe even work with
projects like 
D2OL http://www.d2ol.com/
or math projects like Seventeen Or Bust 
http://www.seventeeno
rbust.com/

There are many distributed computing projects that could use
our help. And 
helping them would give us a larger variety of projects to
work on. And even 
if you don't like my idea of merging with other projects, I
definitely think 
we need more short-term projects. There are many cool
cryptography projects 
that we could compute. And they wouldn't take hundreds of
years to complete 
like RC5.

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On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 04:38:41PM -0400, P WR wrote:
> There are many distributed computing projects that
could use our help. And 
> helping them would give us a larger variety of projects
to work on. And 
> even if you don't like my idea of merging with other
projects, I definitely 
> think we need more short-term projects. There are many
cool cryptography 
> projects that we could compute. And they wouldn't take
hundreds of years to 
> complete like RC5.

I love the thought of helping other projects out, but there
is a
down-side: there's a non-trivial amount of work involved in
adding
projects to our network. For one thing, it means new
clients, which
folks have to go and download. We'd also need to create new
cores to go
in those new clients. I believe every new project requires
an update to
the proxy code, and it certainly means new code for the
master (although
there's been some work on allowing for multiple masters that
might make
this easier). Finally there's stats, with the biggest
challenge there
being "what should I measure".

Of course, all that is just a 'simple matter of code'. It's
really just
a matter of getting it done. I don't want to rain on the
parade, but we
just don't have a lot of time being spent on code changes.
For stuff
like this to happen with any speed, it's going to take some
folks (and
by folks I mean d.net participants) stepping up to the plate
and getting
that work done.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect            decibeldistributed.net
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net
Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"
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