Users let home PCs crunch scientific data in down time

12/02/99

By Doug Bedell / The Dallas Morning News

Humans use only a fraction of their brain power, and the Internet is no different. The millions of often-idle computers connected to the Net are, in the eyes of some researchers, a wasted resource of criminal proportion.

Recently, several groups have developed small programs that can take advantage of idle home and office units, putting them to work on worldwide projects for fun and profit. And the response from the public has been incredible.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, for example, began doling out chunks of radio telescope data to volunteer

computers in May. By October, spurred by the success of the movie Contact, it had enlisted more than 1.4 million "volunteer computers" worldwide in the organization's quest to isolate signals emanating from beyond our galaxy.

The appeal of this altruistic venture is strong for amateur astronomers such as 61-year-old Jack Gross, who formed the MIB (Men In Black) Team with six friends in Bedford, Va.

"Not only do I get to be involved in some authentic scientific research, but also I get to actually lend a hand - and receive, in turn - a little personal satisfaction in helping out," he says. "And of course, there is always that possibility that I might help to solve one of the oldest of questions, 'Are we alone?' "

This method of problem-solving, known as distributed computing, can also be profitable. Devoting his 350 MHz processor to a worldwide contest to find a million-digit prime number, a Michigan man recently won $50,000 when his machine tripped over one with 2,098,960 digits. And private corporations are paying $10,000 or more to prove some forms of encryption can be broken.

Until home computers got online, the power to solve many of these problems was the sole province of large research institutions and corporations.

"What's happened now is that the Internet has allowed all these computers to communicate," says David "Nugget" McNett, spokesman for Distributed.net, which bills itself as The Largest Computer on Earth. "Certainly we've shown that free and donated processors can rival the computer power of the biggest computer you can buy."

Those who get involved quickly become addicted. Simply downloading and installing these small clients, or programs, to their computers gets participants started in the race toward new discoveries. Web sites for the various operations track contributions from individuals and teams formed among friends and co-workers. New chunks of data are piped into home units as they complete analysis of work assigned by each group's servers.

These efforts rely on the brute force of numbers, not processor power. In fact, one puzzle solved for a cash prize by a Distributed.net contributor was deciphered on a Pentium 90 machine with only 16 megabytes of RAM.

Everyone has an equal shot at becoming famous for a rather benign donation. Generally, the client programs run unnoticed in the system tray of host computers. Most shut down when other chores are started up. Users can also schedule the distributed work to be performed only in the wee hours, as well as having their computers automatically dial out results then.

The SETI project hogs the most processing power with a screen saver that displays a dynamic graph of the radio waves it is analyzing. It also shows the location of the part of the sky you are analyzing and your personal contributions - how many chunks of findings your computer has turned in and hours it has worked. But tweaks can be made to disable the graphical display, thus reducing the load on your computer to minimal levels when it is running 24 hours, seven days a week.

Distributed computing devotees get downright evangelical about participating. Project managers report they've uncovered attempts by some users to fudge the amount of time they have donated in order to move up on Web listings of top contributors. Others have confounded office systems administrators by secretly installing the clients on every computer in their workplace without permission.

"Every once and a while we'll get a call asking 'What is this software doing on our machines? Is it a virus? I've never heard of it,' " says Mr. McNett. "Usually it turns out to be someone in the office who just wanted to do better in the statistics. We understand the position of system administrators. It should never be installed without permission."

Most distributed computing programs are available for Macintosh, Linux and Windows-based machines.

Opportunities for this relatively new home computing activity are chronicled and updated at various Web sites, such as JCs Distributed Computing (www.jc-news.comc/parse.cgi?distributed/start).

A rundown of some of the most popular endeavors follows. Remember: You can't win if you don't enter. As Mr. Gross of the SETI project points out: "I believe it is possible for ET to be out there, and I sure would feel bad if he were talking to me and I didn't even bother to listen."

Distributed.net

What started in 1997 among 20 aficionados of encryption has blossomed into a worldwide effort involving more than 60,000 people running D.net, as it is called for short, on half a million machines.

"It's just amazing to me," says Mr. McNett, operations administrator. "It's beyond what we ever imagined. This is 60,000 people working toward the common good."

Not to mention profits for all.

D.net (www.distributed.net) currently distributes a program through which participants compete in cash-prize contests. RSA Data Security Inc. and CS Communications & Systems are the sponsors of the contests, and it is the job of contributing machines to try to break encoded phrases that have been released to the public.

Companies are willing to pay to have these encryption methods busted because they want to prove that stronger encoding methods should be permitted by governments to secure transactions and communications on the Internet. Governments worldwide have insisted that many of the methods being tested should be ample for end users.

RSA is offering a $10,000 prize. D.net will keep $2,000 for building the network and client code, give $1,000 to the computer owner cracking the code, another $1,000 to the team involved (if the winner signs up with friends) and $6,000 to a nonprofit organization decided by a vote of all entrants.

This effort has a track record of success. D.net solved a previous RSA challenge in 250 days.

"Right now, we figure we have a one in 2,000 chance every day of winning," Mr. McNett says. "Eventually we'll get it, but we're only about 15 percent of the way in."

The CS Communications project also carries a prize of about $10,000, which D.net will split in similar proportions to the RSA challenge. That contest, designed to run for about a year, began March 17.

The D.net client has a simple interface. It appears in the task bar of most modern operating systems and can be checked from time to time with a simple click. Batches of "work units" arrive and depart invisibly from Internet-connected machines.

"My mom even runs the client on her own machine," says Mr. McNett. "And she's not the most clued in technically."

She and the rest of the 60,000 D.net helpers just like being involved, Mr. McNett says.

"It's such a salable concept," he says. "You're using an otherwise wasted resource. You're promoting a technology I feel is going to impact the future of computing for the next 10 years."

DCypher.net

The newest kid on the distributed computing block, DCypher.net was launched Nov. 8 to challenge D.net in a race for the CS prize.

Rather than divide up the prize money, DCypher will give the entire $10,500 to the winning computer and will attempt to recoup its own costs via advertising at its Web site (www.dcypher.net).

"The World's Newest Supercomputer" says it tweaked its code to run faster on contributing computers, thus giving participants and the company the best chance to win.

The DCypher site is still being constructed, and there are some holes in its offerings. Clients for some operating systems may need adjustments too complex for average users. But great strides in the code and Web site seem to be made almost daily.

This represents one of the first attempts to use distributed computing prizes as a draw for advertisers. And many analysts are predicting success. Even the largest of the Internet's portals can't offer $10,500 prizes to attract Web traffic.

SETI@home

Honored Nov. 12 by Popular Science magazine as one of the year's 100 best achievements in science and technology, SETI@home (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu) has accumulated more than 100,000 years of donated computer time - more than any other computing project.

It hasn't been without growing pains.

So many people have volunteered to help that the computers at the University of California at Berkeley's SETI Institute have been overwhelmed on occasion.

"Whether or not we detect ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence], SETI@home users have confirmed the viability of an entirely new way of doing science using Internet computing," says project director David P. Anderson.

For almost 40 years, SETI scientists have been searching for signals that may represent intentional transmissions from an advanced civilization in deep space.

SETI@home is a program that uses signals grabbed from the sky by the mammoth, 1,000-foot Aricebo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico.

Huge chunks of data - far too much for the Berkeley computers to analyze - are being gathered, carved up into 350-kilobyte "work units," then parceled out to volunteer Internet computers.

The SETI@home client downloads a segment of signals from one point in the sky and processes it for strong radio signals, which hint of life somewhere in our galaxy.

Thus far, more than 85 million "candidate signals" have been gathered for further analysis in the second phase of this search, which will look for repeat events.

The SETI@home client runs as a screen saver on a PC or Macintosh, so it works when the computer is not being used. It downloads a chunk of radio data, processes it and sends it back to SETI.

It runs in the background while you are working. At least 32 megabytes of memory are needed to run this client, and it will slow older computers noticeably.

Most experts recommend scheduling work for times when the computer is not in human hands. The screen saver graphics can also be disabled to speed processing.

For many participants, such as Mr. Gross, the book and movie Contact captured the allure of the SETI project. Getting their computers involved is a natural extension of their fascination with the heavens.

"One look into the heavens from a really dark site would seize anyone's imagination," Mr. Gross says.

GIMPS

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, has been conducted almost exclusively by research institutions until now, and it carries some huge cash prizes.

There are only 38 Mersenne prime numbers, and GIMPS (www.mersenne.org

rime.htm), which began running in 1996, has found the last four. Mersenne numbers - named after French monk and mathematician Marin Mersenne - are virtually impossible to validate without distributive computing power.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in April announced it would offer $50,000 for the first 1 million-digit prime number, $100,000 for the first 10 million-digit prime number, $150,000 for the first 100 million-digit prime number and $250,000 for the first 1 billion-digit prime number.

The purpose is to spur advances in distributed computing and provide research underlying cryptography, privacy and computer security efforts.

In June, the first 1 million-digit prime number was found by Nayan Hajratwala, a Plymouth, Mich., employee of PricewaterhouseCoopers. His claim on the $50,000 prize is pending.

Meanwhile, the quest for the higher stakes moves on. Using a program prepared by a company called Entropia (www.entropia.com) or at GIMPS headquarters, anyone can join the effort.

In fact, schoolteachers across the country have found students get quite excited about mathematical research when the stakes are this high.

Surprise benefit

Whether you cash in for big prizes or are the first to find a message from ET, there are other side benefits of distributed computing projects.

One hidden benefit became apparent to Mr. McNett when several computers were stolen from a home that was participating in Distributed.net efforts to break encryption codes.

When the thieves fired up the computers and hooked them to the Internet, the processors resumed crunching Distributed.net data, then quietly sent in their results.

Mr. McNett's servers were able to pinpoint the location of the new data and help recover the stolen computers.

"It's like Lo-Jack [a system that tracks stolen cars] for computers," says Mr. McNett. "We didn't intend it that way, but it works."

Doug Bedell can be reached by writing dbedell@dallasnews.com.