While browsing the many projects listed on http://distributedcomputing.info/ I came across a link to my first DC project I participated in. I was a little surprised to find it still active. http://www.distributed.net/ distributed.net was the Internet's first general-purpose distributed computing project.
To give you an idea of the time frame I used a cluster of 5 Pentium Pro CPU/MBs running FreeBSD. I had a main node, dual Pentium 166mz, that also ran distributed.net proxy. The proxy would fetch the work units from distributed.net and then the nodes would get work and upload the completed work all to the proxy. So the nodes only communicated with the proxy and the proxy communicated with distributed.net.
One thing about this project is all the OSes they support. BeOS, Solaris, AIX DEC UNIX and many more.AND Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Wish someone else did that.....
It was a fun project. I learned a lot and got a lot out of it. No one I knew could understand what I was doing. Some was sure it was some witchery or devilry I am sure. Only thing is I really do not care about cracking RSA keys or Golomb rulers.
I am glad to see them still around. I still like the proxy idea although I am sure the idea was managing modem traffic. They still list the proxies in the downloads though.
I may drag out the old quad 50mz Sun Sparc 20 and do a few Work Units for old times sake. Hard to out geek a project like this.
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Originally Posted by PoppaGeek
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