Please help out Max and Harsha test their distributed computing
project. Point your browser to http://mds.g-r-c.com/ and leave it
running while you're not using your machine just for the next day or
so. More info below from their mentor, Nick Bennett.
-Stephen
From: Nick Bennett <nickb...@g-r-c.com>
Date: March 31, 2009 7:56:18 PM MDT
To: Joshua Thorp <jos...@stigmergic.net>, Irene Lee <ireneanne...@gmail.com
>, Paige Prescott <paigeapresc...@gmail.com>, talaya white <talayawh...@gmail.com
>, Steve Guerin <stephen.gue...@redfish.com>
Cc: Meestuh Boing <meestuhb...@mail.com>, harshaviv...@yahoo.com,
robert bond <rb...@csf.edu>
Subject: Help some GUTS-XL/Challenge students, and have your browser
do some work for a change!
Folks,
Max and Harsha, two of our GUTS-XL students, are doing some almost-
final crunching on their project - which is not only their project
for GUTS-XL, but also their Challenge project, as well as Max's
project for his mentorship at Monte del Sol this year.
The project is on distributed computing via applets in web pages.
This approach would allow a much wider range of machines than usual
to participate as computing resources in solving certain kinds of
computationally intensive problems. Also, since the applets in this
case are communicating with the task distribution server via XML-RPC
over HTTP, no special firewall policy or router port configuration
is required to allow participation. Basically, if a user can browse
to the web page hosting the applet, and if the user has Java 5 (1.5)
or higher installed, it's virtually certain that the user's machine
can participate - no matter where in the world the user is, and no
matter how the user is connected to the Internet.
Variations on this kind of distributed computing have been used in
s...@home, GIMPS (Great Internet Search for Mersenne Primes),
cracking some of the final remaining Enigma cyphertext messages from
WWII, and other projects. However, virtually all of these have been
more restrictive in their approach, generally requiring the
installation of special software on the user's machine (often
restricted to a subset of the operating systems and platforms in
wide use), and sometimes special configuration of any firewalls the
user might be behind. Max & Harsha's project is thus an attempt to
demonstrate the opportunity to extend such projects to a much more
heterogeneous world of platforms and networks.
For the proof of concept, they've chosen the search for Mersenne
primes - partly because this is an interesting topic in and of
itself, but also because it's a well-understood problem, with
interesting mathematical and algorithmic aspects, and with an
existing distributed computing project (GIMPS) that can be used as a
point of comparison and contrast.
So my suggestion - to those of you who feel like letting your
computer participate as a resource for some portion of the next 18
hours (as Max and Harsha gather the last round of data for their
report), and if you can spare the cycles - is to point your
JavaScript- and Java-enabled (v5/1.5 or higher) browser to http://mds.g-r-c.com/
- that's it, that's all it takes. All you'll see, as your computer
participates in the process, is a status message that changes from
time to time, and a task history that gets updated every few minutes.
At this point in the search, testing each candidate Mersenne numbers
for primality is a slow process, since we're dealing with very large
numbers (i.e. those currently being tested have over 5,000 digits
when written out in base 10 form). Please note that these tests are
computationally intensive: if you have a single-core CPU, Java will
pretty much try to use all of its power; so if you need to do a lot
of work on your computer, it would probably be less annoying for you
if you don't participate at this point. But the power of the
distributed approach to this problem is that each participant
resource can be working on a different Mersenne number, cutting down
the time to move through the search space. So, if you have the
cycles to spare, join in!
Thanks and regards,
Nick
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