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Every day, googles of CPU cycles go wasted in this country in what must be one of the most inefficient uses of resources on the planet. So how's that for a catchy intro line? :-) Seriously, for those of you with labs of computers which sit idle for portions of the day, why not put them to use doing something useful? Doing what, you ask? How about crunching numbers in an attempt to break encryption algorithms? Or how about processing data to see if there is extra-terrestrial life in outer space? These are two "distributed computing" projects. Distributed computing is simply a technique to harness the power of countless thousands of low-end Pentium, PowerPC, G3, and other PC-type CPUs and to take these individual PCs and use them to do super-computing tasks. Let me give you some background on two projects: Distributed.Net <http://www.distributed.net> first evolved after RSA Labs issued a challenge and cash prize to anyone who could break their RC5-32 56-bit encryption algorithm. Distributed.Net wrote a set of programs to link individual PCs together and found the key to the encrypted data in 250 days. Since then, they have also broken several other RSA keys (in increasingly shorter time periods). Note, there is nothing sinister or malicious about this; they are doing this with RSA Labs' approval (after all, RSA Labs is issuing the challenges and cash prizes). RSA Labs' loves this because Distributed.Net is helping them to "push the envelope" and to create encryption algorithms which are more and more advanced. The project also helps to check for security problems in these encryption schemes which are used to protect credit card numbers and all sorts of other sensitive data. The current Distributed.Net project is to break the RC5-64 encryption algorithm and to capture the $10,000 prize for breaking it. If you're the lucky PC that actually breaks the code, you can win $2000 for having the good fortune of cracking the encrypted data (of the remaining $8000 of the cash prize, $6000 will be donated to charity and $2000 goes to Distributed.Net). The other large distributed computing project is the SETI@home project <http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/>. This is a project to analyze the vast amounts (about 35GB per day!) of data which is pulled in 24 hours a day by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. SETI@home is a 2-year project coordinated by the Univ. of Calif. Berkeley and "is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth." There's no cash prizes involved with SETI, just the satisfaction of you knowing that you "have confirmed the viability of an entirely new way of doing science using Internet computing" along with having the possibility of finding true extra-terrestrial intelligence in space. Now, what does this have to do with education and how can you join in? These projects make a great fun activity for a computer club. If you have multiple computers joining a project you can form into "teams" and compete with other groups of users to see who is processing data the fastest. Of course, the encryption challenge can be used in a math class if you're studying encryption algorithms or the SETI@home project can easily be woven into a science class, etc. Both projects work similarly: you download a client program from one of the above web sites which runs in the background of your computer. The client program downloads data from the Internet site of whatever project you choose and processes that data when your computer is idle (so don't worry, you'll happily run your own application programs without these distributed computing clients interfering with your work or making your machine slow down). Clients programs come in Linux, Macintosh, Unix, and Windows flavors. The Distributed.Net project's client is simple and not complex (it's neatest feature is that you can set it to make a cool cow "mooing" (or other) sound when it finishes a block of data:-). The SETI@home client program is more graphical, showing you a radio frequency-time-power graph and even includes a screen saver which shows you the status of your data processing. Both clients require access to the Internet to send/get their data. Internet access can be either modem dial-up or LAN Internet access, and of course the clients handle proxy servers and firewalls just fine. So, what are you waiting for?! Stop over to <http://www.distributed.net> or <http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/> and put your wasted CPU cycles to use! -- "If the current stylistic distinctions between open-source and commercial software persist, an open-software revolution could lead to yet another divide between haves and have-nots: those with the skills and connections to make use of free software, and those who must pay high prices for increasingly dated commercial offerings." -- Scientific American EDTECH has changed addresses. The new list address is EDTECH@H-NET.MSU.EDU. All subscription commands should be sent to LISTSERV@H-NET.MSU.EDU.
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