Adam Beberg Leaves Distributed.net to develop Cosm

BigJim.fr writes "Adam Beberg announced on the Distributed.net list that divergence of views on the further goals of Distributed Computing Technologies Inc (DCTI) have led him to go on developing independently Cosm, the distributed computing engine that was known as V3 to members of Distributed.net."

It means that they have shafted us...

[marcus]

...out of 2 years of development time.

Check out the latest note from Nasby:

> "With our new forward momentum and renewed enthusiasm..."

Jeez, what a crock.

Cosm open source on May 1

[Doug Merritt]

He said that Cosm would become open source on May 1, so unless that changes, this is very good news, that we've been waiting for for a couple years.

I hope that SETI At Home takes advantage of Cosm; they haven't been too slick about reinventing the wheel, so far.

Cosm should also be rather helpful merely for people who want to do their own distributed computations on a small set of home or school computers, e.g. training neural nets, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, artificial life, etc.

To date, people have had to do home grown distributed solutions over and over, which is pointless, painful, and wasteful. So I hope Cosm becomes everything it promises.

cool :)

[Frederic54]

i've always like dnet and run rc5/des for a long time! now if my computers can be part of a large distributed computing service i find it cool :)
for SETI of for another purpose :)
--

The problem with decryption contests...

[Alexey Goldin]

The idea is to do it because it can be done. It is a game.

As a side benefit those guys worked out many issues with distributed computing which may apply to other areas like SETI.

Client Data

[Delphis]

I wonder, if COSM is what the v3 project was going to be then multiple modules will be available to run different tasks. With these different modules you could get a computer working on any project you choose, but if it's going to be like the SETI client thing it might require lots of data to be sent VERY regularly and make it almost prohibitive to the home user. (Esp. in England with non-free home dialup internet access)
If think you'd have to be careful not to have too many projects requiring lots of data to be moved, that is one of the nice things about the RC5064 project, the data involved is small and basically negligable, unlike a 3MB / night download with SETI.

Just my tuppence worth, yes I'm English ;)

what *is* d.net's vision for the future?

[rillian]

Adam Beberg (duncan) wrote [distributed.net]:
it has become apparent that the goals of DCTI have changed considerably over the years, and are no longer the same as what they were.

David McNett (nugget) wrote [distributed.net]:
It has also become clear to us that Adam's goals for Cosm and distributed.net's vision of its future differ enough to justify this parting of ways. Adam is very motivated about seeing the system he's designed, Cosm, implemented and put into production. True to its name, distributed.net is more focused on seeing what can result from a truly open and distributed continuing development effort. While each of these respective approaches is viable in its own right, attempting to co-mingle them has proven to be counterproductive.

What's the division about? It's clear from these carefully worded pieces that they've decided to split, and they've put an amiable face on it. However, the announcements are so vague I can't tell what the real issues are.

One of the problems I've always had with the d.net project was their closed decision-making style. On the one hand, they've build this wonderful thing for running the DES/rc contests, and made it fun to participate. I think that's really nifty. On the other hand, they've been advertising 'v3' for a over a year now, with its plug-in architecture promising a wide variety of clients to choose from, and an open interface so one may write one's own. But it never arrived, partly, it seemed, because Beberg wouldn't let anyone else work on it. Sometimes I felt like they didn't want to allow any other clients because they'd lose people from the rc effort, which is what they're really interested it. I think this might not be such a problem given rc5's microscopic bandwidth, footprint, and tolerance for latency compared to alot of other distributed computing projects If you think seti@home [berkeley.edu] is bad, try cg rendering, or scientific simulations! Even the Mersenne prime client [mersenne.org] is more efficient with a large (>~16MB) memory allocation.

Nugget speaks of "a truly open and distributed continuing development effort." Their hot new client is the OGR project, and still closed source. Beberg is at least publishing a programming interface [mithral.com], but hasn't specified a license yet.

I've always been bothered by d.net's interest in using my processor for their particular project, paying only lip service to giving (control) back to the community they created. I've always been bothered by their failure to grok open source development.

I guess what all this boils down to is that I'd like to think that either Beberg or others at d.net have seen some light in this vein, but I can't tell which of them it might be. Comments?

Distributed Computing Protocol

[MikeFM]

Is there any such protocol (public, private doesn't count) and does it work on a wide selection of problems? I mean can one machine connect to another at port x and send it a list of arguments telling the other computer about itself and what it's doing and the net address to find the same component to execute or data to share or something. Would be really cool if done right. Rather than needing a centralized server you could have data passed between individual machines in interlinked clusters.

So what's this mean for D.Net?

[Alpha42]

I mean, Adam is the name I've most associated with d.net... then again, maybe that's just cause he's been one of the more vocal folks.. ehehe.. not saying 'the quiet folk' don't contribute, let's face it, the entire idea behind d.net is the 'power of many' as opposed to 'the significance of the one'.. why does this sound like a Star-trek episode gone awry? :)

What's Important

[k3pler]

In my opinion the idea of massively distributed computing is the biggest thing to hit supercomputing since transistors. Cosm is just a natural progression from distributed.net. Coordinating thousands or millions of PC's worldwide and all independently owned is a non-trivial problem, and that is why distributed.net is such a point design built for a specific task of cracking keys. Cosm looks to me to simply be the next step, a more generalized platform for web-based supercomuting. I will support it regardless of what problems it is used to solve. It is the concept that is important to me!