[Hardware] FPGA client

[bovine at distributed.net]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Martin Klingensmith wrote:

> Has there been any agreement on FPGA clients?
> If someone takes the effort to make an FPGA core, would they be allowed to
> use it with distributed.net?

The easiest first step method would be to ensure that the key-checking 
order (at least for the top 12-bits) are the same as what we currently use 
in the standard dnetc code.  (You can choose a different incrementing 
order for the keys within the lower 60-bits, if that offers better 
optimization benefits.)

By doing that, then we can manually coordinate which of the 12-bit 
"subspaces" you can safely work on, without duplicating work done by the 
rest of our network.

Once you have a hardware solution that can do that on a manual basis, 
then we can work out a network interface protocol that can be used to 
mechanically request assignment of "subspaces".

This is similar to the arrangement that we did for EFF during the DES 
project.

-- 
Jeff Lawson   http://www.bovine.net/  http://www.distributed.net/~bovine/
Jeffrey_Lawson at alumni.hmc.edu  jlawson at bovine.net  bovine at distributed.net
Programmer, Developer, Mascot, Founder of the largest computer on earth!
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