[rc5-announce] Great Googly-Moogly! What's news with Bovine?

[David McNett]

As of right now, http://rc5stats.distributed.net/statbar.html says:

   Current Bovine Rate: ~4545.22 mkeys/sec
   
   Our total processing power is the equivalent of 37877 Pentium 133's.

Not too shabby!

Last night we moved the master from the 128K ISDN site where it has been
living for several months and onto a new machine that is fed by multiple
T1's.  In losing the latency associated with the ISDN connection, the
master is now able to keep up with the hundreds of thousands of blocks
coming in from the proxies.  The communication bottleneck we've been having
is the reason that the stats have seem "delayed" lately and why it has
taken several days for you blocks to show up on the stats pages.  Finally,
we are able to run at our true rate.

The backlog of blocks should take very little time to make it to the master
and things should run quite a bit more smoothly from here on out.

On a related note, I think it's damned impressive that our proxy/master
keyserver scheme is robust enough that we can physically move the master
keyserver and client operations are completely uninterrupted.  Not one
second of downtime was experienced by the network.

Second issue is stats.  Aside from the minor addition of the statbar
current rate page and the resumption of timely proxyinfo updates, I know
that things have seemed fairly static with stats.  I also know how
frustrating it's been for all of us to have gone back to daily stats
updates.  Well, rest assured, there's been quite a bit going on in the
background with the stats engine and we're quite close to some nice new
features.  First on my list is cpu/os stats and hosts stats.  These new
areas will most likely first appear with only current data, and the
historical data will be filled in afterwards.  Look for these features and
a few others this week.  Once I've got that in place, we'll move back to
more frequent updates.

Today also marks our passing the point in the keyspace at which DESChall
found their key.  Now, I know that statistically that doesn't mean very
much (if anything) but it certainly does act as a subtle reminder that we
could be finished with this project AT ANY MINUTE. We are processing keys
at an absolutely AMAZING speed.  I can honestly say that I never expected
the effort to reach this size, much less to be at this size and continually
growing.

Finally, I'd like to extend my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to
Andrew Meggs with regards to the recent attack on his network at
antennahead.  Having been the victim of malicious computer vandalism
myself, as well as having been on the receiving end of a few
Denial-Of-Service attacks I know how frustrating and maddening it can be.
I have no idea how a person could be so immature and shallow-minded to
think that this was a good idea or would accomplish anything positive.
While I am frustrated that Andrew felt the need to hinder distributed.net
in his attempt to get Apple's attention, I understand _completely_ why he
feels that strong action is required and support him in his decision.  If
there is anything I can do to assist, he need only ask.  While the
bovine/distributed.net MacOS client will survive and even exceed previous
versions, I'm sure, it would be a mistake to devalue Andrew's significant
contribution to the code and the effort in general.  If he chooses not to
return, his presence will be sorely missed.

On an entirely unrelated note, I checked my 100,000th block yesterday and
still can't quite come to grips with the immensity of that number.

Keep on cracking!  Go Bovine!

-/\/ugget
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