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Currently the RC5-72 and OGR-NG projects are active.

Version 2.9101.507 of the client is available for most major platforms as of November 22, 2008. Pre-release version 2.9101.508 is available for Linux platforms with the nVidia CUDA GPU and for the Sony PS3 CellBE Linux platform as of November 25, 2008.

See a log of an IRC discussion forum with some of the project coordinators which took place on September 28, 2002. They discussed the results of the RC5-64 project and future directions for distributed.net.

Use the RC5 key-rate calculator to see approximately what RC5 key-rate and OGR node-rate your CPU will produce. The calculator was created by CalicoJak in January, 2003, and was last updated on February 22, 2006.

OGR-NG:
~52% in 73 days

PS3

On February 28, 2007, the project reported its 100th prime to the prime pages.

On November 26, 2006, the project began working with Twin Internet Prime Search, and is supporting a second sub-project to help that project.

On October 3, 2008, the project achieved "'optimal' sieve depth [in the Cullen/Woodall project] ...actually, a little beyond it. Therefore, we are stopping the 32 bit and 64 bit Cullen/Woodall Sieve applications and archiving the sieve. Cullen/Woodall LLR will remain active up to n=10M. For more information, please see this forum post."

On August 8, 2008, the project announced a "Dog Days of Summer Challenge." The three-day challenge ran from August 22-24 and supported PrimeGrid's 321 Prime Search LLR application. See more information in a forum thread about the challenge. On September 6, 2008, the project announced a "Back to the Future Challenge." The 14-day challenge ran from September 13-27 and supported the Woodall Prime Search for the next record Woodall prime. During the challenge, "over 8,000 Woodall [work units] were completed by 204 teams and 1108 individuals." See more information in the challenge's forum thread.

The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. Version 5.13 of the project's Prime Generator client is available as of May 16, 2006. Version 5.04 of the project's LLR Prime Search client is available as of November 25, 2006.

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The project cracked its first message on February 20, 2006. It cracked its second message on March 7, 2006.

On May 27, 2008, the project attempted to decode the Scharnhorst message and succeeded the next day.

The project uses "a mixture of brute force and a hill climbing algorithm" to crack each cipher. The Enigma keyspace is too large for a brute force approach. The hill climbing algorithm tries to optimize the plugboard settings (which form a very large part of the keyspace) by changing the settings one step at a time and evaluating each step by determining how closely the deciphered plaintext matches the statistics of natural language. The scoring function uses Sinkov Statistics. The software client uses a Python script to download a workunit containing a range of 26^4 keys. It then uses a C program to test each key in the range, and then returns the best or most-fit result to the project server.

See the M4 wiki for notes on running the client interactively, for running it on Mac OSX and Solaris, for running the client behind a firewall, and for many other useful tips. Note that there is no way to specify a user ID or to see your individual statistics. The client supports checkpointing, so it will restart at the point you stopped it the next time you run it. The latest version of the client is available for all supported platforms as of March 29. This version "avoids duplicate scrambler testing and has the ability to download new dictionaries. It also uses different naval dictionaries. Participants are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

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To participate in the project, download the DistrRTgen software client from the project website and run it. Free registration is required (only a username and password, no other information is collected). Version 3.26 of the GUI client is available for Windows as of June 9, 2008. Note that you need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed to run the Windows client.

Join a discussion forum

The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. The project runs the "SHA-1 Collision Search Graz" application within BOINC. Version 5.27 of the application is available for Windows and Linux as of August 8, 2007.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. Version 5.17 of the project's Enigma 0.76 application is available for Windows as of September 11, 2007. Version 5.20 of the application is available for Linux as of September 25, 2007. Version 5.22 of the project's Enigma 0.76b application is available for Windows and Linux as of August 24, 2008.

Join a discussion forum about this project.