[Previous Article | Next Article | Index of Articles]
This article first appeared in the February 1998 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
There's an old saying that a million monkeys with typewriters would eventually produce Hamlet. It wasn't until recently that this experiment could actually be tried. Now all the monkeys and typewriters we need are on the Internet. So far, a new Hamlet hasn't appeared, but we've just begun.
The Monkey-Hamlet experiment is an example of distributed computing--many small computers each working alone on a tiny part of a big problem. Individually, each of the small computers doesn't have much power. Collectively, they have massive computing power. Many experts think the future of supercomputing is distributed computing on the Internet.
Over the last year or so, several massive distributed computing efforts have appeared. The spark that ignited most of the activity is a set of challenges offered by RSA Laboratories (http://www.rsa.com), the largest producer of encryption software. RSA posted a series of encrypted messages on its web site and offered prizes of several thousand dollars to anyone who could read them.
Of course, RSA isn't doing this just for fun; its motives are blatantly political. Most other countries have no restrictions on encryption software. The United States classifies strong encryption software as munitions, and controls the export of such software outside the USA and Canada. This gives software companies elsewhere in the world a competitive advantage over RSA. In fact, some American companies such as Sun and DEC are exporting their strong encryption software from Russia, India and Israel in order to make an end run around American laws. RSA hopes to call attention to this problem with their challenge.
One way to attack RSA's encrypted messages is to methodically search through an enormous number of possible keys to find the unique key that unlocks the message. This method is usually called the brute force approach.
In one of the easiest RSA challenges, called DES-56, the key turns out to be one needle in a haystack with 72,057,594,037,927,936 straws. An actual haystack with this many straws would be nearly a mile high and two miles wide. Such a large collection of keys can't possibly be searched by a single computer, so a better idea is to distribute the keys among many computers.
At least three large distributed efforts arose to attack DES-56 by brute force. The actual key was found after about four months of searching by a volunteer group of about 8000 widely scattered computers called DESCHALL (http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm). They got lucky and found the key after looking at fewer than a quarter of the possible keys.
The basic idea behind DESCHALL was that "a cycle is a terrible thing to waste." Most computers are doing nothing most of the time, so DESCHALL freely distributed client software which used the unused clock cycles on personal computers to unobtrusively crunch keys in the background. The client software was written for various versions of Unix, Windows and, of course, the Macintosh.
To the surprise of many die-hard Unix and Windows fans, the PowerPC Macs turned out to be amazingly fast at testing keys. It was not unusual for a fast Macintosh to test several million keys per second. Unfortunately, the winning key was found by a Pentium based computer. (Although the Pentiums were slower, there were just too many of them.)
After DES-56 was solved, DESCHALL disbanded. But one of its rivals, the Bovine group (http://rc5.distributed.net), continued. Bovine moved on to attack another of the RSA challenges, called RC5-56. Again, the PowerPC processor in the Macintosh proved to be the best chip for the job. At the same clock speed, a lowly 603e cracks about 20% more keys than the much heralded Pentium II.
By the middle of last October, Bovine consisted of more than 10,000 computers from all over the world, and it was sifting over 4 billion keys per second. Bovine had become the most powerful supercomputer ever, and Macs were doing over 20% of the work even though they accounted for less than 15% of the computers.
RC5-56 fell to Bovine in the middle of October. (A Pentium based machine found the key, again.) They immediately moved on to a much more challenging RSA problem called RC5-64. They're still looking for the RC5-64 key, and anyone with a computer and Internet access can join in on the fun.
All this has caught the attention of people who need supercomputers to solve serious problems. Bovine has changed its name to distributed.net, and is setting itself up as a general purpose supercomputer. There has been talk of using distributed.net to analyze DNA, weather patterns and output from particle accelerators.
One of more intriguing possibilities is for distributed.net to take part in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There is a novel computing effort called SETI@Home (http://www.bigscience.com/setiathome.html), which would lend itself well to distributed.net. They plan to sift through mountains of data from radio telescopes in hopes of finding telltale signs of life in space.
Several ongoing and proposed distributed computing efforts which have Mac clients are listed on the Distributed-Mac web page (http://www.distributed-mac.net/). Anyone with a Macintosh and Internet access can go to work.
New Software
Apple announced Mac OS 8.1 would be released in early February. This is the first update to the wildly successful Mac OS 8. A free updater for Mac OS 8 will be available on Apple's Internet servers and Claris is already taking orders for a CD-ROM.
Those of us who have been using Mac OS 8 for the last few months will attest that it's rock-solid, and one of the best software releases to come out of Apple in several years. Version 8.1 has several performance improvements which have long been needed in Mac OS. The most noticeable to most users will be the improvements in file handling and virtual memory, which promise overall speedups in launching programs and working with big files. Apple has also revamped the way information is stored on hard drives, so they use space more efficiently. Other significant enhancements include a new Java virtual machine and Open Transport 1.3.
Microsoft announced that Office 98 for the Mac will be shipping in March. This is the first major release from Microsoft's large new Macintosh programming group, and Microsoft is touting it as the first version of Office to be written from the ground up to take advantage of Macintosh features.
Recent versions of Office on the Mac retained a distinctly Windows look and feel, which was like putting a square peg in a round hole. Perhaps Microsoft began listening to Mac users after the release of Word 6, which was slow, bloated and clumsy to use on a Mac. Early reports are that the new Word is much improved.
Office 98 will introduce a new feature in that it will be self-repairing. If any of its applications detect missing System files, that application will reinstall them on the fly. Since so many incompatibility problems could be traced to extensions installed with previous versions of Word, one can only wonder if this is such a good idea.
Connectix is shipping Virtual PC 2.0, which they claim is 25-40% faster than version 1.0. It emulates a a Pentium MMX based Intel standard machine with Sound Blaster Pro compatibility on any PowerMac. Version 1.0 does a good job running Windows 95 on a Mac, as long as you don't have the need for speed. Virtual PC 2.0 is Windows 98 compatible.
Despite its legal troubles, Microsoft has presented Internet Explorer 4.0 for Macintosh fresh out of the oven and still free for everyone. It includes a snazzy new email client with the odd name Outlook Express. Netscape Navigator has been getting more and more bloated with all its recent releases. Explorer 4.0 is positively svelte in comparison and feels somewhat faster. Many people are going to have to put aside their political differences with Microsoft and admit Explorer is the browser of choice. Worry about your Netscape stock.
February LCS Meeting
The February 23 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will have demonstrations of the new ClarisWorks, ClarisWorks for Kids and Claris Home Page. The meeting will start at 7:00 PM in the East Government Center on Juneau Drive in Middletown. Everyone is welcome. More information about the LCS can be found on its web site (http://www.aye.net/~lcs).
[Previous Article | Next
Article | Index of Articles]
/home2/lee/www/cgi-bin/textcounterdata/ [TextCounter Fatal Error: Could Not Write to File __lee_macwritings_LCN9802_shtml]