[ANNOUNCE] [ADMIN] Happy Anniversary, RC5-64!

[David McNett]

If you've been able to look at the stats since they wrapped up this
morning, you've probably noticed a pretty significant figure on the
main page.  Not quite as stunning as our having reached 3% earlier this
week, but a definite milestone nonetheless.  We've now been at this
thing for a year now, having just wrapped up our 365th day of working
on RC5-64.  

We've proven quite a bit over the past year, and have really
established ourselves.  For all the people who said RC5-64 was
unbeatable, we've managed to bring our worst-case completion time from
1,234 years to just under 5,000 days -- and we're not stopping there. 

There were people who said that we wouldn't be able to sustain interest
in such a huge undertaking, and to those people I mention that we've
tripled in number (participants) and we're running 100 times faster
than when we started -- and we're not stopping there, either.

We've easily established our strength, longevity, persistence, and
commitment, and even still I believe we're only just beginning to flex
our collective computing muscle.  

What's more, right now is possibly the most exciting period ever in our
collective distributed.net history -- we're right on the verge of
beginning a second, concurrent project (OGR) and are close to having a
stats server worthy of our impressive stats.

WHERE WE STAND

For the seven days ending 23-Oct-1998, we did 91.9 million blocks for
an average keyrate of 40,801 Mk/s. This is an increase of 1,146 Mk/s
from the prior week.

At 40,801 Mk/s, it will take 13.60 years to exhaust the keyspace, down
from 13.83 years last week, and 78.96 years from our first month on
the project (22-Nov-1997).

If our rate is growing linearly at 41,702 blocks per day, we will
exhaust the keyspace in 4.2 years. If our rate is doubling every 124
days, we will exhaust the keyspace in 1.6 years.

Assuming linear growth, we have an 11% chance of finding the key
in the next year.  If our growth is exponential, it's a 24% chance.
The odds are about 1 in 4,956 it'll be tomorrow. 

There have been 49,020 emails that have submitted blocks over the last
30 days (out of a total of 101,660 emails overall).

On a related note, right now /each/ of the US round-robin proxies is
averaging 6,000 Mk/s, which is just a bit higher than we ever got
*overall* during the entire rc5-56 project.

WHAT WE CAN EXPECT REALLY SOON

There *is* actually a new stats server, running healthy and fast, and
maintaining a pretty current database of stats activity.  I've been
putting quite a lot of energy and effort into re-structuring the
databases to handle our size, and build in the hooks needed to support
all the features that you have asked for.  
finger nugget at distributed.net for details.

HOW YOU CAN KEEP AN EYE ON THINGS

Although it's already been mentioned, and I've got plugs all over the
stats site, I'd like to remind everyone to have a look at the
distributed.net finger-board where you can keep up-to-date on the most
recent activities within the distributed.net effort.

http://nodezero.distributed.net/cgi/dnet-finger.cgi

If you don't have the time, inclination, or patience to hang out in
IRC, this should be the first place you look to stay current on the
who's who and what's happening with distributed.net

It's not too late to join us in Atlanta for the Atlanta Linux
Showcase!  http://www.ale.org/showcase/  Nothing offical, but
it turns out there's a non-zero number of us who will be there.
If you plan to be in Atlanta on Saturday, let me know so I can
add you to the list of distributed.net participants who will
be in attendance.

-- 
 ________________________________________________________________________
|David McNett          |To ensure privacy and data integrity this message|
|nugget at distributed.net|has been encrypted by using dual rounds of ROT-13|
|Birmingham, AL USA    |finger nugget at distributed.net for my news and pgp|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 366 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.distributed.net/pipermail/announce/attachments/19981023/6cc7a402/attachment.bin