Hosting Problems For distributed.net 214
Yoda2 writes "I've always found the distributed.net client to be a scientific, practical use for my spare CPU cycles. Unfortunately, it looks like they lost their hosting and need some help. The complete story is available on their main page but I've included a snippet with their needs below:
'Our typical bandwidth usage is 3Mb/s, and reliable uptime is of course essential.
Please e-mail dbaker@distributed.net if you think you may be able to help us in this area.'
As they are already having hosting problems, I hate to /. them, but their site is copyrighted so I didn't copy the entire story.
Please help if you can." Before there was SETI@Home, Distributed.net was around - hopefully you can still join the team.
Re:Distributed hosting? (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty much same concept as any clustered computing, the pipes are always important, and no, u can't 'distribute' the connections.
Multiple problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Next, the integrity of the project gets called into question the moment you begin allowing clients to check processed blocks. The number of fals positives could easily shoot through the roof. Also, a computer with bad memory or simply running a faulty OS (such as Win9x/ME) could overlook a true positive, thereby virtually obliterating the project (ie. "we're at 100% completion with no result, guess we start over?")
As stated above, stats would be impossible to do in this manner, and the same applies for key distrobution. One could argue that the total keys be distributed amoung thousands of nodes and handed out from there, but you create more problems then you solve. You still need a centralized management location to keep track of keys that have or have not been tested. Imagine a node going offline permanently or simply losing the keys it was handed. Suddenly, a large block of keys is missing. As it stands now, the keymaster simply re-issues the keys to someone else after a couple of weeks of no response from the client it sent the original blocks to. Under a distributed format, the keymaster would have to keep track of which keys went to which key distributor, which of those came back, which of those need to be redistributed, where they... (you get the message.)
Next you run into another problem of integrity. What's to stop each distributed keymaster from claiming it's own client is the one that completed all blocks submitted to it. Consider this example, central keymaster sends out 200,000 blocks of keys to keymaster node 101. Keymaster node 101 distributes these keys to a bunch of clients which process the blocks, then send them back to keymaster node 101. Keymaster node 101, which has been modded slightly, then modifies each data block, changing the user id to that of the keymaster's owner, thereby making it appear that any block coming back from keymaster 101 was processed by keymaster 101. It might be easy to spot, but then how to you find out who to give credit to?
The webpage doesn't attract the majority of the bandwidth; the projects do. Distributing the projects would be disasterous, as many have already tried taking advantage of the current system to increase their block yields through modded clients. Luckily, this is easy to spot for now. Under a distributed system, this would be next to impossible. All this, and I've yet to make mention of the fact that the code would have to be completely re-written to work alongside a custom P2P application, which would add months of development to a project that probably only has weeks or months left in it.
In short, someone host the damn thing, k?
Re:Dnet, is it useful ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cancer research? I've yet to see a viable distributed project for cancer research. By that, I mean an organized effort with real data, a complete and concise goal, and a clean method for reaching that goal. Distributed raytracing? More pretty pictures on the computer screen.
You want to draw pretty pictures, I want to brute force an encrypted message to prove current laws regarding encryption are draconian and need to be changed immediately. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would think dnet is more usefull than raytracing....
Think of all the cpu cycles wasted!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Reality (Score:1, Insightful)
That would lead to a lot of blocks being processed more than once before the entire keyspace was exhausted, increasing the time required.
Re:Solution: make money. (Score:2, Insightful)
Getting donations of bandwidth and hosting is harder because those are ongoing commitments (including potential staff-support, and physical colo access, etc).
Direct money donations are also somewhat hard to get. Fortunately distributed.net is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means anyone can donate and receive an income tax writeoff (see articles of incorporation [distributed.net]). Tax day is coming up soon, folks! :)
Re:"I hate to /. them but..."? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Aliens, crypto or cancer - what's your choice? (Score:4, Insightful)
If d.net did something interesting, like attempt to find an improved factoring algorithm, or to find a way to perform interesting analysis on ciphertext, then it would be useful. Right now though, it's a 100% useless application.
Think for a moment about what d.net truly does, and tell me with a straight face that it's interesting to either a cryptologist or a cryptanalyst.
If you want to help somebody with your spare cycles, you can help cure diseases [intel.com] or if you're so inclined, you can perform FFTs on random noise. [berkeley.edu] Don't try to tell me that d.net helps anything though; you're kidding yourself if you think so.
Someone please explain... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thier site is popular enoug that it would seem to be a good time to experiment with moving the http stuff to freenet, since it's only updated once per day. The people willing to download the dnet client are would seem to be some of the most willing people to download the freenet client. Freenet is designed so that the slashdot effect actually increases reliability and speed of acess for the commonly requested data. Distributed.net would seem to have reached a critical mass of readership in order to have reasonable reliability for its freenet page. Your could have the client get your team and individual scores sent to it as part of the block submission cinfirmation.
It would seem to me that they could arbitrarily reduce their bandwidth requirements by increasing the minimum size of keyspace portions they're handing out. It would seem that thier project traffic would be (or could be made) the same for each work unit, regardless of the size of the work units. Bigger work units are really only a problem for clients that are turned off and on regularly. They client still only needs to keep track of current state (current key in the case of RC5), the final state of the work unit (last key to check for RC5) and the current checksum for the work unit. None of these change in memory requirements as you increase work unit sizes. 99% of the people don't know the work unit size anyway, so changing the work unit size won't cause many people to complain, particularly if it's necessary to keep dnet hosted.
Unless I'm mistaken, the server really only needs to send the client a brief prefix identifying the message as a work unit, followed by "start" and "stop" points for the computation. For RC5, this would mean a 64-bit starting key and a 64-bit ending key. I haven't sat down and worked out the cannocalization scheme for GRs, but it seems that they are countable (in the combinatorics sense, not the kindergarten sense) and could be represented fairly compactly. The current minimum ruler length need not be sent, snce you'd probably always want the client to send back the minimum ruler length in it' work unit anyway. The client would need to send back a work unit identifier (this could be left out, but it's not strictly safe) and an MD5 sum of all of the computational results or some other way to compare results when they duplicate work units. (A certain percentage of the work units are actually sent tomultiple clients in order to check that everyone is playing fairly.)
Re:Dnet, is it useful ? (Score:3, Insightful)
It does that with a ton of people until it finds the right key. It will eventually crack every crypto they throw at it, because it's only a matter of time.
Seti@home is searching for something that they don't even know if it's out there, and can you imagine the impact if they do find PROOF that there's life somewhere else? That's far more important then stupid crypto keys and such
the UD cancer treatment, while iffy because it's probably set up to benifit a company still has a HUGE impact on EVERYONE'S life.. I don't know anybody that either hasn't had cancer or a family member that has had cancer, and to find a cure!
Re:Don't laugh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Because they started RC5-64 over four years ago and probably didn't change their frame of reference since then, only the multiplier.
Sort of like how some PC magazines do benchmarks of things such as hard drives with old systems, to ensure that you can compare last week's results with some numbers published two years ago, in a semi-meaningful way since the only thing changed is the different hard drive.
Re:Dnet, is it useful ? (Score:2, Insightful)
> candidates has a high likelihood of being
> developed into a drug
>
Which will then be sold back to you at prices, where dying from cancer is probably the better choice. Profits, amazingly, do not get donated to the Free Software Foundation but to lawyers fighting the demand for affordable generic drugs. The drug-empire CEO's meanwhile sip martini's floating in their yacht just a couple miles off the coast of the Karposi-Belt...
Re:Practical? (Score:2, Insightful)