Joined the Mersenne Prime and RC-5 Projects

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Today I joined two distributed computing projects to run on my linux box for a while. I thought both of these projects were pretty neat, and since they offer the chance of earning cash (long shot), I figured it would be worthwhile of the time my linux box isn't being used by me. The first one I joined is the Mersenne project. This is a distributed computing project to find the first 10 million digit mersenne prime number. I'm not too much on math, so I'm not 100% sure what a mersenne prime is, but the software was easy to install and run. The site is at www.mersenne.org and they can give you more information about what your computer will be doing, as well as get you the client and everything you need to get started.

Since the file came in tar.gz format, this was a good excercise for me to learn how to use gunzip and tar (I'll post more on that later). Quick note on the client, this does NOT hit your hard drive much at all. I think it hits the hard drive every half hour or so to save the data, but other than that it is kept completely in memory and runs in the background. Clients are available for many platforms, so I'm sure there's one for you there.

The second one I joined was the RC5 project. This project is cracking cryptography. While interesting sounding, you really don't do much at all. This one also doesn't pay as much as the Mersenne project once you crack the code. However, once again a chance to use my recently learned tar.gz skills <G>. This client was just as easy to setup and information is available at www.distributed.net.

Since my linux box cannot yet connect to the internet (as you'll remember , I still have a winmodem in the box) I can't upload and download my data files from the box. I have to download them to my laptop then sneakernet them over to my box. Hopefully soon the modem will come in :)

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