Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects has been updated :: Ars Food Court

writes: Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects has just been updated. The 4 most recent updates are listed below.
February 3, 2004

ChessBrain attempted a world record for "the largest number of distributed computers used to play a single game" on January 30. 2,070 machines competed against one chess Grand Master. The game ended in a draw.
Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles on February 2
version 0.8 of the MD5CRK client is available as of January 31. Also, the project needs volunteers to translate the site into Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, German, Dutch and Arabic.
an anonymous platform mechanism for the BOINC platform is available as of February 1. It allows you to run BOINC on any hardware platform.
version 2.22 of the BOINC Beta Test SETI@Home client is available for Windows as of January 30. This version fixes a bug in the previous version. Windows users should upgrade as soon as possible.
prerelease version 2.9007.488 of the distributed.net client is available for Mac OS X as of January 31

January 26, 2004

RSAttack576 has officially ended (it ended in December sometime). An effort to solve the RSA 640-bit challenge will begin sometime in the next month or two.
on January 22, a bug was discovered in the Lifemapper project server which prevented clients from returning results. The bug should be fixed now.
version 0.7.6 of the MD5CRK client is available as of today. Also, the project needs beta testers, and it has a discussion forum as of January 23.
version 2.20 of the BOINC platform client is available for Windows as of January 23. This version fixes a bug in the previous version. Windows users should upgrade as soon as possible.
prerelease version 2.9007.488b of the distributed.net client is available for MorphOS as of today

January 23, 2004

Riesel Sieve found its fifth prime number today: 246299 * 2^752600 - 1. Also, a new 96K riesel.dat file is available as of today. Sieving with this file will be about 2% faster.
version 3.0123.02 of the ChessBrain Windows graphical client is available as of today. Version 3.0122.01 of the Linux and Mac OSX command-line client is available as of yesterday. Please download the new client as soon as possible if you would like to participate in the project's world record attempt on January 30, 2004. The attempt starts at 11:30 AM EST (4:30 PM UTC). The project needs MANY participants for the attempt.
for the month of January, ElevenSmooth is looking for "factors of 40 or more digits.... All factors found are likely to qualify for inclusion in Paul Zimmerman's list of the Top Ten Factors Found by GMP-ECM This Year, at least for a while."
version 4.00 of the Folding@Home client is available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX as of December 19, 2003
new distributed development platform: GnutellaHTC
new news article: plants may regulate
their "breathing" using a form of distributed computation

January 22, 2004

new upcoming Cryptography project MD5CRK (this project is in development (alpha) stage and has a client application and a Java applet that you can run now)
IMP released rendering job 30 yesterday
version 2.19 of the BOINC platform client is available for Windows as of January 17. This version fixes a bug which causes a crash or causes a large debugging file to be created. Windows users should upgrade to this version as soon as possible. Version 2.18 is available for all other platforms as of January 16, and users should upgrade to this version as soon as possible.
version 4.33a of the Distributed Particle Accelerator Design client is available as of January 17. It is about 20% faster than previous versions, and fixes some minor bugs.
beta version 1.23b of the Find-a-Drug windows client is available for testing as of January 14
prerelease version 2.9007.488 of the distributed.net client is available for MorphOS as of January 19. This is the first version of the client for this platform.
new news article: a comparison of utility and grid computing