Reporter seeking distributed computing feedback

[Gopher4u]

Hi,
I'm a reporter and also a grad journalism student doing a story on distributed computing. I am looking into a few areas
1- people who participate in volunteer distributed computing projects such as folding@home, seti@home and others.
2-people who participate in programs that pay you to run programs
3-people who participate on a team for projects such as distibuted.net, seti@home, folding@home or others

If you fit either of these categories, I'd love to know the following
1-what programs you have used
2- how you first found out about whatever program you use
3- how you found out about a team and why you joined
4-what intrigues you about distributed computing
5- what you see as the future of distributed computing
6-how valid do you think the science is behind these programs. i.e do you think they really contribute to science and why? technical stuff is great?
7- If you are willing, you full name, age, occupation and place of residence.

A little background on me. I'm a reporter with the Medill News Service in Chicago. I'm a science writer who stumbled upon this topic and got stuck and fascinated.

Thanks,
Erika Cohen

 

[Gorgonzola]

1- D.net client (rc5)
2- ppl in these forums
3- same as above
4- i dont know...stats are cool 😛 (and the competition makes it fun)
5- i think eventually this sort of thing will be used on something a little more useful than most at the present time. for example, searching for aliens is pointless 🙂
6- well, im not a sciency kinda person, so i'll let someone else answer that 😉
7- 16 y/o, australia

 

[Adul]

Are cracking with us 😉

I use Distributed.net Dnet client for RC5-64 and OGR. I found out about the team thanks to people like Russ who said they where "hooked on crack". I had to see, I then look into Anandtech main page for team info and I ended be interested enough to join in. I love the stats the most, and the fact so many computers can be brought togther for a single project. Has for the future, I hope to see many more uses for the vast amount of computing power available around the world.

<-- 24/male

Phoenix Az

 

[BurntKooshie]

<< 1-what programs you have used >>

- RC5, CSC, RC5, S@H, Gamma Flux, and....that's it so far.


<< 2- how you first found out about whatever program you use >>

- Front page news on AnandTech when the team was first created a little over 2 years ago.


<< 3- how you found out about a team and why you joined >>

I owe a lot of knowledge of computers (and, my initial interest, which got me started on everything) to AnandTech. I joined the team to &quot;pay back&quot; so-to-speak


<< 4-what intrigues you about distributed computing >>

Dist. Computing is something that has been a dream of a few for a long time. There are those who have known that this was going to come to pass since the 70's. This is just the realization of those ideas. What intrigues me is the fact it can, is, and will make a difference in humanity. Whether that be good or bad.


<< 5- what you see as the future of distributed computing >>

I've known since I started that this was going to go commercial. Now Juno is using it so that they can offer &quot;free&quot; (in a monetary sense) ISP service. Others are paying users directly. There are so many amazing possibilities. For anyone interested in a longer term view on this, I recommend &quot;Alien Intelligence: After the Internet&quot; by James Martin. While I don't agree with everything he says, there are some intruiging possibilities.


<< 6-how valid do you think the science is behind these programs. i.e do you think they really contribute to science and why? technical stuff is great? >>

Some do. For certain, OGR will make a huge difference. S@H, potentially (though the chances are remakebly small considering the science involved, narrow bands being scanned, etc). RC5....bah. Nope. But I do it anyway 😉. Gamma Flux - certainly. Others could too.


<< 7- If you are willing, you full name, age, occupation and place of residence. >>



If you're really interested in this, I'd prefer to recieve an email from a reputable address (i.e. a work adress which I can look up). My email's in my profile.

 

[Green Man]

1. setiathome_win_3_03, setiathome-3.03.i386-winnt-cmdline, SETIDriver, SetiQ3.03Beta3c, SetiSpy.

2. I heard of the SETI project a while ago, but didn't think I could do it because I had a slow dialup connection (a misconception). I recently got cable internet service and decided to find out more. I asked a ton of questions here both before I decided what DC project to do, and while I was getting started. (thanks, people 😀, my questions haven't stopped yet😉 )

3. I went to others forums before I found this one, but the message boards were uninteresting. When I found this place, I knew that I had found the team I would join. It's the people here that make the difference.

4. I first wanted to find out more because I liked the idea that my computer could be doing something useful even if I was not. Now it's mostly the competition, oh, and the team spirit here.

5. I don't know much of the past or the present, I'm really not sure of the future.

6. I hope this is valid, I'm waiting to catch the ET equivalent of Giligans Island reruns 😉

7. email me

 

[Viztech]

Gopher-

You may want enable your personal profile and email. You'll be sure to get some good responses.😉

BTW, Welcome to TA. Are you cracking yet?

viz

 

[ElFenix]

hi!

well, i'd say something flowery, but then you're the journalism student so maybe you should make that up 😀

i have used Cal's seti@home software, started july 19.1999 according to the helper program setispy. i have used both the screensaver and command-line version of the client, but i prefer the command-line for faster operation and the amount of helper programs available for it. i've also used distributed.net's client to process RC5-64 and OGR distributed projects for the Team Anandtech miniteam &quot;Seti Cavalry,&quot; of which i'm a founding member.

i first found out about seti@home back in my freshman year of college (fall '97/spring '98), from my roommate's brother. i signed up for their mailing list. they sent me a beta notification back in early '99, but they never told me it went gold (released to public). so i stumbled upon it that fateful day in july while looking for cool screensavers. as for dnet, i found that running on a friend's computer back during my sophmore year. little did i know he was running for TA. anyhow, back then i had some qualms with it being somewhat of a hacker project (it is cracking encryption, after all). but then i became educated about the project.

the first team i was on for s@h was started by a friend as a &quot;small company team.&quot; i kept stats for it and was oftened ridiculed by my friends for caring too much about seti. so then i found out my school (university of texas at austin. hook 'em horns!) had a team, and was somewhere around 10th in the universities. so i joined that. and worked really hard to get the UT-CS team to join in with the rest of us and boost us to 3rd or so, but that never panned out. so after two days of lurking in this forum back in august, i joined TeAm Anandtech.

what intrigues me? the stats. i, and most of the people on this forum, am a stats junkie.

the future? well, i talked to the United Devices guys when they had a company night at UT a while back, and if they are going to do commercial applications the client and its work will have to be a lot more secure. d.net was plagued with security problems back in the early days, someone hacked the client to send back null results for all the keys they'd been sent without even checking the keys at all. and then there is the phantom flusher, who wrote a program that installs the dnet client as a trojan horse on someone's computer without the user's knowledge. the phantom flusher has gotten quite a few anandtechers in trouble. and about two weeks ago seti@home had a major client problem. some guys had hacked the s@h client to send null results for every WU it received. these guys were propelling, AFAIK, the ars-technica team lambchop to the number 1 position, ahead of sun microsystems. that was a terrible day. Poof visit's ars' forums more than most here, maybe she'll elaborate. anyhow, if commercial applications and valid scientific results are to be expected, the clients need to be more secure.

RC5, IMHO, doesn't advance the science of cryptography much, if at all. everyone knows that if you check every possible key the right key will be found. but RC5 did set up the feasibility of distributed computing for tasks that can be broken into many independent pieces. if your results relied on previous results the task would not be good for distributed computing. dnet now has the OGR project, which is real-world useful. it finds something called goulomb rulers, which can tell how far cell-phone frequencies should be spaced for optimum signal strength, how far apart radio telescopes should be spaced for radio interferometry (spelling?), etc. as for seti@home, i figure they had the science worked out a while ago. it all operates on a hunch that if intelligence was broadcasting it would be on the frequency emitted by hydrogen when excited or something. there was a rather good article about the science about 2 months ago. as for the other projects, i don't know much about them. its usually colleges and universities running these things, its not in the project's interests to have bad science. i've heard that some of the newer projects will be completely outstripped by purpose-built computers within the next couple of years, though, so they may not be worth doing. such as genome@home, which will be trivial next to the power of ibm's blue gene.

you can check my profile for most of the contact stuff. send me a PM (private message, its those little icons on the right side of the post) for the rest

 

[networkman]

1) Seti@Home and RC5(Distributed.net)

2) I've always had an interest in UFOs and I believe ET's really exist so I wanted to be involved in helping find them; as for RC5, I simply wanted to help my fellow TA team members win back 1st place in the competition.

3) I did some web-surfing and researched several teams before choosing to join Team Anandtech; I chose to join the team that I found was the most friendly, knowledgeable, and willing to help others.

4) The fact that I as an individual can be involved in a project with a goal so grand and so immense that volunteers are needed to make it work; I've also learned alot about tweaking my computers(even with being a PC/Network technician before I joined the project!)

5) With the pioneering work done by both Seti@Home and Distributed.net, many new projects have begun to spring up to tackle new tasks.. that alone is the best compliment that can be made, and provides a good glimpse of the projects that are yet to come.

6) I've had some questions about the type of analysis being done in the Seti@Home project, especially with proposals being raised about other forms of long range communication, but the effort itself is a worthy one; as for RC5, a brute-force attack on an encryption code is surely NOT the most efficient means of breaking it, but this will certainly qualm the nerves of those who were reluctant to use new services available with encryption techniques, such as the use of secure web pages with encrypted credit card transactions - if it's taken THOUSANDS of computers YEARS to even come close to just 40% of all the possible combinations for a 64bit code, then the new 128bit and 256bit encryptions used to protect e-commerce type transactions must be relatively safe to use.

7) My email address is listed in my profile.

 

[ViRGE]

Humm, where to start...

1) I've used SETI@Home, Dnet's client, and Dcyphere's client; though I only really use Dnet's client at the moment,

2)I first found out about the Dnet client when Anand mad ea post on Dec. 26, 1998, about forming an Anandtech RC5 team. After the novelty of a new 8MB Voodoo 2 wore off, I started messing with the client, since it was something new to me.

3)I found out about Team Anandtech for the same reason as why I found out about the client; Anand's post. The team was brand new at the time though, so honestly, we didn't havee much of a team until the following January.

4)Distributed computing intrigues me because of what it can do. Big problems exist, and up until the advant of DC projects like what we do now, a big, expensive super-computer was the onlly way to even hope to solve them. DC intrigues me because it accomplishes the same results using a big, cheap network of computers instead. Getting that kind of power for so little cost; and then solving giant problesm with it, is whatmakes DC so interesting. The fact that it's new, and realitively unexplored and untested, doesn't hurt it either.

5)I see DC becomming almost essential in the future. People love getting something for supposedly free(take Napster for example). They won't see the CPU time and power as a real &quot;cost&quot; for them, so people will be eager to participate in order to get cheaper/free ISP services and such. This will lead to the formation of both a &quot;for profit&quot; circuit for the reasons above, and the continuation of the scientific circuit, like what Dnet, Dcypher, and SETI do.

6)I think at the moment, the science is worthless. If you take SETI, they've started doing more science on their WUs in 3.03, but their previous WUs don't have this science. If this science were nessisary, they would have been allready doing it, or avoiding it alltogether if it wasn't. there's also the issue of project integrity. If clients are't secure against being hacked(in order to return false blocks), put out as a trojan(to give illegal credit to someone, as in my case), or just bad data(20% of Dnet's CSC data was orginally bad), it'll also make the projects mostly invalid; which is something I hope current projects teach programmers how to prevent. If these are solved, I think that they'd definately contribute to science then. Most projects are definately realistic(RC5 determines RC5's strength, SETI checks for other life, ect), and in the future, I think we'll see some [vb]very[/b] scientific projecs comming our way.

7) Ryan Smith, 15, Student/IS Support/teamanandtech.com developer, Oregon.

 

[BGod]

1.) dnetc v2.8012-465-GTR-01010823 for Win32 (Windows 4.10) is the version I'm running now, but I've been in this since May 20, 1999.

2.) I saw a banner ad on someone's homepage, and it lead me to Anand's RC5 FAQ.

3.) Simple really. The first machine I built from scratch was with the help of articles I read at Tom's Hardware. I was hopelessly hooked after that first machine - Pentium II 266MHz. Every machine I've built since then has been hardware that I've read about on Anand's site. It seemed like a good idea at the time, now like the rest of my fellow team members &quot;I'm addicted to crack!&quot; There really is a diverse bunch of tallent on Team AnandTech. If anyone has a problem, it gets answered in the BBS, mIRC or via E-mail. I wouldn't even think about switching teams because I'd lose my tech support!

4.) The fact that you can get a bunch of guys/gals together that normally wouldn't associate with each other, put a common goal in front of them, and for the most part, they all seem to get along.

5.) Bringing massive ammounts of processing power to bear on a problem in hopes of solving maybe even life's greatest mystery - &quot;Where in the h3ll are my car keys?&quot; There are lots of attempts at drawing people into it for the money. If that makes your boat float, then so be it. After RC5-64 is over I'm not sure what I'll do with my heard. I'm sure there will be another contest using the dnet client.

6.) If there wasn't a bunch of sience to prove, do you think that RSA Labs would have issued the &quot;Secret Key Challenge&quot;? It's mathamatics in it's rawest form. They set out to prove how tough their encryption scheme's were to crack. RC5 has been worked on for 3.33 years and only 40% of the key space checked.

7.) Jeffrey L. Benson | 33 | Service Clerk | Williston, ND

 

[xrayman]

<< 1-what programs you have used >>


Dnet's RC5-64



<< 2- how you first found out about whatever program you use >>


As a regular visitor to anandtech.com in search of the latest news and reviews about PC hardware when building my third machine I read about the project and joined the team. This also answers Q:3.



<< 4-what intrigues you about distributed computing >>


At first it was just a curiosity to me. Then as I got more into it, through this forum, I became more interested in data security and was also quite impressed with all the support so freely offered by so many knowledgeable people here. Actually distributed computing seems, to me at least, to be the most logical way to crunch massive amounts of data by organizations that do not have the funds or equipment to do it on their own. Of course this assumes that the work is suited for a distributed project.


<< 5- what you see as the future of distributed computing >>


I've never been good at predictions. But I'm guessing that as computer technology advances into the quantum realm, distributed projects using PCs will no longer be viable solutions. I think there will come a day when anyone can buy a small amount of time on a quantum machine which could find the RC5-64 key in just a fews days or even hours. OTOH we may someday all be able to afford a neat little quantum tech PC which we could use to contribute to some future gargantuan computing problem.



<< 6-how valid do you think the science is behind these programs. i.e do you think they really contribute to science and why? >>


With the right projects and great clients I think that this venue could be very helpful particularly in the fields of medicine, engineering, and research of many kinds.
If you look for instance at SETI@home and RC5, the enormous amount of data that needs processing in order to answer the big questions &quot;Are we alone?&quot; and &quot;Where is that dang key, anyway?&quot;, would require the use of computers that could/should be used for more relevant/important work if it were not for the current distributed projects. This is an indirect contribution to science today.

If you PM me I can give the personal info you want.

Geoff
p.s. Just in case you haven't looked;
Zapzilla's article about Team AnandTech
Official Homepage of Team AnandTech