Distributed.net RC5-72 ... anyone in?
 

I think distributed computing is an awesome thing... but I'd rather be doing it in the small chance of earning cash than finding a useless prime number. However, with the current rate for the RC5-72, it is not going to be finished for many years...

In fact, the current project will not suceed in any of our lifetimes at the current rate. It will take 1179 years to finish. Join up! Distributed.net needs more crunching power! Membership is down to less than an eigth of what it was for RC5-64.
We can even make a TFproject team if you want!

Check it out at Distributed.net

Things like this really have no point, but maybe over time distributed computing will get a serious notice and one day, we'll actually be paid for it and people will stop building super computers....

most super computers nowadays are distributed systems.

there was a pay site for giving up cpu power, iirc it was the split off from dnet orgiinally


i don't want to think about how much money i spent on the previous competition :)

I'd gladly donate my computers' time, but they all run the SETI@Home client. While I am very fascinated by cryptography, I can't quite convince myself that the RC5 challenges are useful applications of computing power.

SETI, at least, has an idea of what to do when they succeed - the RC5 folk just create a new contest (no offense to them).

I fold, sorry. I think cryptography and ETs and stuff are cool.. but folding can benefit us more I feel.

Yep. I did it for a while until I realized how trivial cracking that number was. If it took that long to crack (three years for the last one, IIRC), it is fine for most applications.

SETI I would consider.

I ran RC5-64 clients for pretty much the whole project's lifetime (~5 years). I think I checked about 3-4 trillion keys. Then I realized that I wasted a lot of electricity just by running systems at full steam all the time.

If I were to spend money on electricity, I'd probably fold (I am a former member of the Distributed Folding project as well).

The RC5, OGR, SETI, etc. projects don't really make sense to me, anymore.