Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Adam Clark <adamsgl AT dhbit.ca>]

Or, a complete waste of idle CPU time...

Hey all,

As you are probably aware, there are several projects online that allow 
your CPUs to participate in a large group project doing something 
useful, probably the most famous of these is Seti@Home.

Another of these projects is called distributed.net[0], which may have 
been the first of it's type.  It's been around for years, has completed 
several of the contests that it set out to finish, and is still going 
fairly strong.

The goals of distributed.net are varied, depending on the contest it's 
running, but they've basically created one of the world's fastest 
computers by utilizing people's spare CPU cycles.  When one participates 
in the projects, you usually have a chance to win a little money if one 
of your CPUs is the one that completes the task at hand, and if nothing 
else, you get lots of pretty stats to show you how you're doing in the 
grand scheme of things.

There's also groups that you can belong to, to try and show that your 
group is the fastest of them all, or, at least, got a fair bit of CPU 
behind it.

As a side-effect, this is another way that SMGL can get a little 
exposure, by showing that we can be one of the more powerful groups out 
there.

So, I recently loaded up a bunch of machines that I have control over 
with the distributed.net client, and started the SMGL team.  My personal 
crunching stats can be found at [1], and the SMGL team page is at [2].

If you'd like to check it out and/or participate, please visit [0] and 
consider running the client on your systems.  If you do start it up, be 
sure to join the SMGL Team[2] once the next d.net stats run is done.  
Unfortunately the client's binary-only, but they provide some 
information on their site as to why that's always been the case.

Please feel free to reply to the list here if you've got any questions 
that [0] doesn't answer!

-Adam Clark
-Web Team Lead

[0] - http://distributed.net
[1] - 
http://stats.distributed.net/participant/psummary.php?project_id=8&id=451789
[2] - 
http://stats.distributed.net/team/tmsummary.php?project_id=8&team=31299

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