Every day, millions of computers across the world chug away for hours
trying to solve the same problem: how to make little stars dance across a
monitor. The amount of computing power wasted on screen-savers is mind-boggling.
So some software designers have written 鈥渄istributed computing鈥� programs that
can use the Internet to tap some of that wasted PC potential鈥攚hich adds up
to tens of thousands of supercomputers.
Perhaps the most famous鈥攁nd most notorious鈥攄istributed
computing project is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at
http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm. Thousands of users share their unused
computer time to find primes of the form 2p-1, for prime p. Currently, GIMPS
holds the world record for the largest prime. However, one participant was
accused of 鈥渉acking鈥� when he tried to use a phone company鈥檚 network to help
out.
Several distributed computing projects are devoted to cracking encryption
schemes, spurred on by the cash rewards offered by some companies for
deciphering sample messages to prove whether or not a system is secure. One site
which has several cracking efforts going on at the same time, is at
http://www.distributed.net/. Another is devoted to cracking elliptic-curve encryption, at
http://www.labs.bt.com/projects/security/crackers/p97/.
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Perhaps you have a problem that you would like to crack, but you don鈥檛 have
access to a supercomputer. Never fear: a team of computer scientists at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have written software to create a
鈥淧arallel Virtual Machine鈥� out of lots of smaller computers at
http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html. This is not an exercise for the faint
of heart鈥攏ot only do you need to have a good deal of programming ability
to create a virtual machine, but you鈥檝e also got to have a problem that can be
split up and welded together again. However, if you鈥檝e got both, then get
cracking.
