distributed.net

The Organization

distributed.net was the Internet's first general-purpose distributed computing project. Founded in 1997, our network has grown to include thousands of users around the world donating the power of their home computers to academic research and public-interest projects. Join us in this ground-breaking computing experience. We need your help...

It's very simple to participate in our challenges. You only need to download a small program, which will talk to our network and begin to process parts of the current challenges. The program uses only the computer's idle time, so when you want to use your computer, the client will automatically get out of your way. Plus, there's that cute little cow icon...

There's more information on setting up the client, and about what our mission statement is.

Recent Headlines

Two percenter

In November 2011 we passed 2% completion on our RC5-72 project, and 1000 days into OGR-27. See bovine's blog entry for some more details.

GPU clients charging ahead!

Since the official release of our optimized clients for nVidia CUDA and ATI/AMD Stream video card architectures, our overall progress on RC5-72 has increased in speed greatly. If you have a supported video card and aren't running one of our GPU clients already then you might want to try it out today! See mike's blog entry for some more details.

OGR-26 completed, OGR-27 started!

On 2009-Feb-24 the last OGR-26 stub was received, thus marking the conclusion of OGR-26. Read more in bovine's blog entry, including details about what you need to participate in OGR-27!

Secret Key Challenge status

In May 2007, RSA Labs announced that Secret Key Challenge would be discontinued. Fortunately, due to the continued interest in our RC5-72 project we have decided to privately sponsor the prize and operate the RC5-72 project as before. You can read about this in bovine's 2008-Sep-08 blog and in bovine's 2007-May-21 blog.

Special thanks

 

distributed.net would like to thank Internet Systems Consortium and Midas Networks for their donations of secure collocation space and bandwidth. We are pleased that these organizations support our endeavors and continue helping us provide a high level of service for our members.

Other Neat Things

dnetWare is now available! Check out our line of distributed.net merchandise including shirts, mugs, mousepads, and more!

Here are a few other neat places to visit:

• Beautify your workspace with a desktop picture of our logo.
• Do you have a webpage? You can help advertise distributed.net by putting a banner on your pages!

Further Information

If you want to learn more about our project, first stop by our Press Room to read the announcements of our past victories; then browse the following.

• Read our How To Help.
• Check out our documentation section.
• We have some Mailing lists you can join.
• For our international members, you can contact your Regional Representative who will answer your questions in your native language.
• There are always people online on our IRC channel #distributed on our private IRC network irc.distributed.net.