Antionline Distributed.net Team?
Hello, I haven't been are AO for a long while (dang College), but I just had a thought. I was wondering if any other Antionline members wanted to create a distributed.net team.
What Is Distributed.net?
Quote:
Founded in 1997, our project has grown to encompass thousands of users around the world. distributed.net's computing power has grown to become equivalent to that of more than 160000 PII 266MHz computers working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year! Our infrastructure has been enhanced over the years and refined to a point where it can reliably handle tens of thousands of new computers. Join us in this ground-breaking computing experience. We need your help...
It's very simple to participate in our challenges. You only need to download a small program, which will talk to our network and begin to process parts of the current challenges. The program uses only the computer's idle time, so when you want to use your computer, the client will automatically get out of your way. Plus, there's that cute little cow icon...
(Source: http://www.distributed.net)
In other words, you can donate the idle processing power of your computer, whether it be Mac or PC (including Linux, BSD, etc...), to solve various problems. Currently they are working on an encryption challenge to test RC5-72bit encryption to verify its security. Also, they are working on something called Optimal Golomb Rulers, which is very difficult to explain, so here is the link http://www.distributed.net/ogr.
Wouldn't That Slow My Computer Down to a Crawl?
No, as I said earlier, the distributed.net client uses the 'spare' processing power of your computer, so if you are playing a computer game that used 75% of the CPU's power, distributed.net would use 25% (assuming nothing else on you computer used the CPU).
If anyone is interested in this idea, you can either email me at hamiltona at mchsi.com, post here, or drop me a private message. Thanks for your time.
