Prof. James Challis' Most Excellent UK Team is a team working on a number of public distributed Internet processing projects. We started life in November 1997 as a group of friends (predominantly CUASians) who were working on distributed.net's RC5/64 project. This quickly grew to include CIXen who quickly made a dent in the team statistics! The team now covers the whole of the UK, and even includes a handful of people from other countries. We were the most successful UK team working on RC5/64 for much of the project's lifetime. We continue to work on other distributed.net projects (OGR and RC5/72), we are also working on SETI@Home, climateprediction.net, the grid.org projects, and the NFSNet project. If you are on CIX, you can find us in the cix:distr_net_comp conference.
So Who is this
Challis Bloke Anyway?
Jon Atkins maintains a set of
most excellent team graphs for our active projects.
distributed.net is the longest running distributed Internet processing project of any reasonable
size. Having finished the RC5/56 and RC5/64 code cracking competitions, they are working on the
RC5/72 competition, and finding Optimum Golomb Rulers.
Advantages: Client is small, so it runs well in a continuous mode.
There are lots of options so that it can be configured for virtually all environments. The client
is available for a huge number of CPUs and operating systems.
Disadvantages: Options might be baffling for a beginner. Many say
that the RC5 code cracking competitions have now served their purpose. Although OGR has
applications, it is too esoteric for many people.
Professor Challis' distributed.net page
SETI@Home has received much more publicity than distributed.net but has not been running as
long. Data from Arecibo is searched for potential signals from extra-terrestrials.
Advantages: Arguably more practical than OGRs. Success would be one of
humankind's greatest moments. There's a nice GUI interface and display. It can also be
used as a screensaver.
Disadvantages: Even its most ardent supporters accept that success is
unlikely. Client is larger than the distributed.net client, and often runs better only when the
computer is not being used for other things.
Professor Challis' SETI@Home Page
grid.org runs a number of projects including THINK which is a collaboration with the
Chemistry Department of the University of Oxford to find anti-cancer drugs. Publicity has been huge.
grid.org has started to run other projects including drug searches for various pathogens including the
smallpox virus. You may choose which projects to accept to reject.
Advantages: Probably the most immediately practical of any of the
distributed Internet projects. The anti-cancer theme
appeals to a lot of people on a personal level. The client looks to be well designed.
Disadvantages: Some people think the drug projects are merely doing the hard work
for the drug companies to produce very profitable drugs. New projects tend to get added and set as the default,
so you may end up working on political projects which you do not agree (eg. searching for drugs to combat
viruses which have been eradicated decades ago).
Professor Challis' grid.org Page
climateprediction.net is a project to run a large Monte Carlo type simulation of
Global Circulation Model (GCM) parameters, in order to improve climate predictions for the 21st Century,
and to quantify the errors involved. Although there is currently a broad agreement that temperatures
will rise, predictions of the magnitude of this temperature rise vary tremendously.
This is a collaboration between a number of universities and organisations in the UK, and has research council funding.
The project went live in September 2003, and team statistics are not yet available.
Advantages: Useful, practical project with some nifty graphics of the GCM
simulations.
Disadvantages: The client is large. One block of data takes a long time to
compute: a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 will take about 3 weeks to finish one processing block.
Professor Challis' climateprediction.net Page
NFSNet uses the Number Field Sieve to factorise large numbers from the Cunningham List. This is for
use by the prime number community.
Advantages: Currently a small project, hence an individual can contribute a significant
chunk of the processing.
Disadvantages: The results are perhaps a little esoteric for some tastes.
Professor Challis' NFSNet Page
Thanks to Andy Young for the logo!
Thanks to "JG" Weston for the original team graphs.
Thanks to Jon Atkins for the running the team graphs.
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