Ten Years of Distributed Computing with distributed.net

By Ivo Janssen

Grids come in many shapes and forms, and one of them is the Global Public Grid. Often presented in a philanthropic wrapper, these grids harness the power of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of computers, often residential personal PCs. Among the most well-known to the general public are Seti@Home, Folding@Home, IBM's World Community Grid and United Devices' now-retired Cancer Research project. Apart from running the Cancer Research project as an employee of United Devices and my involvement with the World Community Grid as a vendor to IBM, I have been involved in a somewhat lesser known but much longer-running public grid project.

One of the longest-running public grid projects is distributed.net, a project that I have been part of since the inception in early 1997. Earlier this year, we celebrated 10 years of "crunching", contributing to various projects in such fields as cryptology and mathematics. It might be a lesser known project in the eyes of the larger public, but still has generated a lot of participation amongst computer enthusiasts and it even won a few awards, most notably a recognition of Jeff Lawson, my coworker and one of the founders of distributed.net, as the most notable person in IT for 1997 by CIO Magazine.

Back in 1997, distributed computing was a very novel concept, but it got jumpstarted by RSA's "RC5-32 Secret Key Challenge", which set out to prove that 56-bit RC5 was not a secure algorithm anymore due to increased speed of computers. In early 1999, distributed.net also proved that DES, another 56-bit algorithm, was getting weak by brute-forcing a secret message in 22 hours, 15 minutes and 4 seconds.

Over the years, distributed.net has undertaken 3 RC5 projects, 2 OGR projects and 3 DES projects, by utilizing over 300,000 participants running on 23 different hardware and software platforms, and it's still going strong. In October 2007, various staff members of our global team came to Austin Texas for a "Code-a-thon", working on the statistics back end to provide our "members" with better individual stats, and a new project that we're planning to roll out in the next couple months.

So if you have any spare cycles on your home computers to spare, why not give distributed.net a try.