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Distribute Stuff: Cosm Project's CS-SDK 65

Posted by timothy from the hither-and-yon-and-hither dept.
Duncan3 writes: "After almost 3 months of public testing the Mithral Client-Server Software Development Kit is now officially out. The Mithral CS-SDK is a part of the Cosm Project which longtime slashdot readers will remember, and is fully buzzword-compliant with "distributed computing", "peer-to-peer", "file-sharing", and "cycle-sharing" - meaning you can easily build any of those types of applications in a weekend. So I expect to see slashdot readers put out at least 20 projects by next Thursday. The Folding@home project based at Stanford has been running for a couple months now doing protein folding and uses the CS-SDK. You can visit them at and download their client software or OpenGL screensaver for Linux x86/Alpha, Tru64, and Win32." Interesting to see how mainstream distributed computing has become even in just the past 12 or so months. Fold proteins, find aliens, break crypto ... what else?
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Distribute Stuff: Cosm Project's CS-SDK

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  • Echelon? Carnivore? Distributed? (Score:5)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @11:01AM (#760845) Homepage
    Maybe some of you will remember this article, reposted on alt.humor.best-of-usenet...

    ---------------

    You may have heard or Echelon, the worldwide computer system that
    monitors all electronic communications.

    Well, don't believe what the conspiracy crackpots tell you - it does not
    automatically detect messages containing sensitive keywords. Using voice
    recognition software on all the data that's been recorded needs a lot of
    computing power.

    But now you can help. Download the new Echelon@Home screensaver - it
    regularly retrieves recorded conversations from the archives at Menwith
    Hill and, while your computer is idle, scans them for keywords.

    If you want a copy of the screensaver, simply send a message with the
    subject line "Echelon Wiretap" and you will be emailed a copy.

    It doesn't matter who you send it to, we'll get the message.

    ----#('!(- ECHELON AUTOMAILER ----------

  • Re:What else? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    <poster name="TBHiX">Karma Whore</poster>
    <post type="lame">Mention XML</post>
  • I run LARGE analysis jobs on my workstation, which I would dearly love to foist on the other several hundred computers on our companies network. However, I am using canned stress analysis code (writing my own is not a true option) which I can not modify to take advantage of distributed computing techniques. I propose a program which emulates the hardware and allows NT or Linux or WHATEVER to be installed on it and then goes ahead and distributes work out to other computers as if they were merely more cpu's in parallel with the servers own... Can the boys and girls say 'cluster'? But this time only one cpu is always there, the others check in and out as their screen-savers switch on. Someone just go ahead and write this, I and many others would pay money for this sort of thing!!

  • Just out of curiousity, what hardware/software did you use to do that, I get bored sometimes and already have the software, any help would be appreciated :)

    Someday I'll make devildog.org [devildog.org] into something.

  • Isn't this using your computer to basically fund the computing bill for a corporation?

    WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

  • All of the proteins in my body are already folded! And I didn't use even 1 computer to do it. In fact, I did it all before I even knew the word protein.

    So, ha!

  • Re:What else? (Score:3)

    by TBHiX ( 26224 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @01:37PM (#760851) Homepage

    "That's all well and good, but searching ads doesn't require distributed computing. It requires 10 seconds on a 386."

    There are other concerns where the distribution might help. For example, how many ad sites are out there with stale ads? By maintaining your own ad on your own "servlet" app, ads should be better maintained. If you don't want people looking for that used TV you were offering because you sold it, you nuke the ad on your machine. Presto! No more appearing in search results! Compare this with the week or so worth of phone calls in a paper after a sale, or the tendency for people to convieniently "forget" to delete an ad at, say, Excite after it has served its purpose.

    Use of an appropriately flexible format (I work with XML, so I'm biased as some have noted, but whatever works...) can make this a reasonably effective "distributed classifieds", IMUO.

    -TBHiX-

  • Not to nickpick, but shouldn't that be:

    <poster type="Karma Whore">TBHiX<poster>
    <post type="lame">Mention XML<post>

    ;)

    -TBHiX-
    Who regularly gives up his seat on the bus to just about anyone, so I guess you're right. ;)

  • I tried to build it and I get an error running the configure script:

    ./configure: line 1928: syntax error near unexpected token `;'
    ./configure: line 1928: ` for ac_config_dir in ; do'

    Has anyone figured out how to fix this?
  • ... Fold proteins, find aliens, break crypto ... what else?

    How about exploring the fundamental forces of nature and structure of the universe? That's what the GriPhyN [griphyn.org] project (Grid Physics Network) will be supporting. Some other related grid projects and forums can be found on the Links [griphyn.org] page.

    Another good description of GriPhyN, maintained by one of the principle investigators, is here [ufl.edu].

  • Hardware:
    350mhz B&W G3 Mac - 192mb/15gig
    Sony TRV900 Camera (great camera! a cheaper one chip camera would work just as well for digitizing though)
    Apex 600A DVD player (with macrovision turned off - this is important)

    Software:
    Apple's Final Cut Pro (for editing. a great program!)
    MediaCleaner (for compressing, kinda sucky but the best thing i've found)

    Have fun!
  • Been there, done that.
    It's called mosix [mosix.org], it has some pretty neat herustics to figure out if it would be better to swap this to another machine, or leave it on the current machine. In fact, if you run it at a low priority, most of the people on the network probably wouldn't notice much of a speed drop. However, it's not ported to NT, so you'll just have to stick with linux (I know that'll just ruin your whole day)
  • You could also use distribution of work as an Anarchist's dream: thousands of computers around the world working to stick it to The Man[...] I can't think of any applications off the top of my head...

    Hacking SDMI (so that we can once again make legal fair use of purchased material). (That is, after it's been released and gone into use, of course...)

    Generating .ogg's of every public domain bit of audio available and DivX:) recordings of every public domain video clip(old newsreels and such, for example) to be placed in a huge central repository somewhere to be preserved?

    Seems like good use of clock-cycles to me...


    Joe Sixpack is dead!
  • I would read the license before I leapt at it and developed something that actually uses this. Especially if you work for a commercial entity. The license has a real NASTY ring to it and I would advise everyone to stay FAR away from this software until the license has been changed:

    1. You are hereby granted a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use the Software subject to the terms and conditions of this License. You may use the Software on any computer for any commercial or non-commercial or research work, provided that you do the following: make available the source code used in the project at the start of such project, and any changes in the source during the course of the project, make available within 30 days of project completion all data and results of your project for which you used the Software, and if the project takes over 60 days to complete, or is continuous, publish all data and results of such project every 60 days, or if this is impractical, transmit the above to a third party, named by Licensor, to be made a part of a public archive.

    As soon as I read the license I deleted the CVS tree from my disk. I don't even want to be tempted to use this thing with its current license.

  • Try this one! (Score:3)

    by mholve ( 1101 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @11:02AM (#760859)
    It's called electricsheep [electricsheep.org] - a distributed screensaver.
  • This one is called "electricsheep" [electricsheep.org] and uses a distributed approach to preventing burn-in of your monitors. Looks pretty cool.
  • What else? Common! ID Software hasnt even *STARTED* development on CS-Quake!
  • anyone wanna take john and build a distributed password cracker from it ? john's still single threaded and single cpu based...and the hacks that turn it into distributed are fairly shitty and crash a lot.
  • A classified advertising system might work nicely like this, where you post your interests, and while your system is idle it sifts through all of the items listed by other users to seek your objective.

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by quigonn ( 80360 )
    CS [counter-strike.net] now has a SDK?
  • Save yourself the worries of mpeg players and the like. If you want to see psychedelic shapes just do what I do: Drop two hits of acid and stare at a tree or something.

  • What would be *really* cool, IMO, is an expansion of the computer-designed robots [slashdot.org] that were developed by genetic algorithms was modified to use this as a distributed computing method, each client having the task to test one mutation for the appropriate features, and the base software mainly bookkeeping the results and doing the necessary mututions and reaping. I'm certain that there's enough geek interest in this, that Lipson and Pollack would love such help in this.

  • find prime numbers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My favorite distributed project is at http://www.mersenne.org [mersenne.org] where you can help find a mersenne prime number. If you are the first one to find a 10 million digit one you can win $55,000. It has support for Windows 95-2000 (& NT), Linux, FreeBSB, OS/2, DOS, and Windows 3.1. You can download it here [mersenne.org].
  • When you first heard of random access memory, did you wonder how that could possibly be useful?
    --
  • How about someone coming up with a decent distributed development environment. I mostly work on fairly large software systems (100's of source files) and there is no reason I should have to wait for more than a few seconds for a project to compile and link, especially when I have a largely untapped 100 megabit network and numerous computers setting around doing nothing 99% of the time. There's no reason source files couldn't be replicated over an entire compilation farm every time they are saved to disk and then when I kick off a build, I could have everything compiled almost immediately.

    How about using some of that untapped processing power to help me develop code faster. It wouldn't be easy, but some real time code analysis tools might be pretty handy too.
  • Yeah! That's the aim of the InterSAINT Project [intersaint.org]! Imagine Artificial Neural Networks algorithms running in millions of distributed computers. They would learn from different data inputs to achieve good goals. There's also a mailing list for the project [egroups.com]. NOTE: The power of all the computers connected to the Internet could now be very near to the power of one human brain (in terms of speed, memory,... ).

    --
    ACid [intersaint.org]
  • Calculate Pi [cecm.sfu.ca], of course!
  • If you really want to just edit and do compositing with DVD movies, you don't need to (and shouldn't) convert them to DivX. Just use them in as uncompressed a format as you can. Or if you have a DVD player that can output without copy protection (like the Apex), your best bet would be to record the svideo out directly to your DV camera, and then firewire that into your computer (along with the shots you made yourself). I did this with some shots from FightClub (to make an incredibly lame "Wassup" spoof [nbci.com]), and the quality was great.

    - Isaac =)
  • Here's a whole bunch [hadleyfruitorchards.com]. That'll be $14.95.
    --
  • hell yeah it would take forever. but why not?
  • ahh, but can you stop the acid from the command line? also, can your acid handle dpms mode? we must be concerned about saving power here.....

  • Not to nickpick, but shouldn't that be:

    Not to nitpick, but it's spelled nitpick.


    --

  • Thanks. Sometimes I and my fingers don't agree as to what to type. ;) Note also that I didn't properly close those tags (shout be </...>).

    -TBHiX-

  • That's it! (Score:4)

    by InfinityWpi ( 175421 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:44AM (#760878)
    A distributed screen-saver! All these monitors that auto-power-off don't need to spend their precious CPU cycles on a screensaver for themselves, so use them to run a screensaver on another computer! Imagine how fluid a single screensaver coudl be if it has the processing power of twenty CPUs behind it? Imagine, real-time-rendered flying toasters! Video-quality fish! You could fly through space just like you see on Star Trek!

  • Now I can start gearing up for that Massive DDoS I've been dreaming about!

  • Good news both internal and external (Score:3)

    by cetan ( 61150 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:44AM (#760880) Journal
    In addition to seeing a rise in internet-based distributed computing projects, Cosm (as I understand it) will enable companies to use their vast internal network for real-world business applications. This is pretty exciting stuff.

    Now, if I could only convince my PHB...

  • The Internet 2000 Sept 21 - In a bold move toward a new economy, Everquest has declared that they are releasing a new Distributed computing component, where-by those who wish can log-in and help the company make money at home, by racking up huge on-line times.

    When asked for comment those ISPs and local connection carriers responded favoriably with AOL even going so far as to commit to include the component in their new release "AOL 6.6.6", Codenamed 'The Beast' and due out October 31st.

    Most users responded favoriably saying "More Everquest?!? Must play!! Can not sleep!! Food irrelivent!!" before hanging up on this correspondent.

    Anallyst agree that it could be a risky move and have docked Sony Entertainment 3 Fig Neutons as collateral, in case they are unable to make this new business model make oodles of money.
  • The Folding@home people are "currenty working on" a screensaver for Linux. Right now it's just console.
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • It sounds really good, but an API is just an API, providing foundation for potential work.
  • Render visual effects for cool movies of course!
    --
  • It was mithril in the book.
  • Yea, we haven't released the linux screen saver, but the windows version has been out there for quite a while. Also, most linux users have asked for a console version. Anyway, hopefully it will be released in a week or so.

  • Larger N American farms are increasingly using satellite generated scans of their fields to tweak fertilizer inputs, spot the extent of insect infestation, etc.

    A distributed computing application could crunch the data from flybys of developing world farms, and deliver low bandwidth digests to info kiosks.

  • It's 42...

    We just need the question.
  • What about a Distributed Chess tournament? You could have competitions against teams (Team Slashdot vs. Team Microsoft) or all clients against one person like the Deep Blue chess matches.
  • The real question is this: what do people like so much that they would be HAPPY to give you free access to their cycles?

    I'd say something that entertained them, or made them feel like they were helping change things for the better (hopefully both).

    Having said this, it would appear to me that a few obvious uses of this technology would be in online gaming. You could have distributed updating & rendering of a complex vector+bitmap environment, or maybe running game AI routines that required a lot of brute-force. You might, for example have a distributed Deep Blue that could kick some Russian Grandmaster's ass like he was some moron from shop class.

    You could also use distribution of work as an Anarchist's dream: thousands of computers around the world working to stick it to The Man (whoever that might be). I can't think of any applications off the top of my head, but I would LOVE to know that my screen-saver was amplifying the voice of the Fringe.

    As a last example, there might be some Health-related tasks that people could help with. Imagine an Open Source bio-tech effort that hurt the Pharma giants they way it hurts the Software giants. This protein-folding thing is only the beginning: modeling molecular interactions to screen candidates for a new cancer drug might make people feel they were "helping". Wouldn't it give YOU a warm, fuzzy glow?

    Anything I've missed?

  • AI (Score:1)

    by akelian ( 235699 )
    I would really like to see atempts to implement Artificial Intelligence over the network. Maybe the concept of "agents" moving between several machines, learning from each user and environment... You could deply several small programs with individual functions, make them fight to achive some objective, and melt their characteristics using genetic algorithms, could work to try to find the optimum software for a specific task.

  • So? (Score:1)

    by vla1den ( 233261 )
    "Network functions" is just one group of functions among 17 other groups [mithral.com] like memory, UI, CPU etc...
    "distributed computing", "peer-to-peer", "file-sharing", and "cycle-sharing"? Here is a whole list of functions to easily build any of those types of applications in a weekend :
    v3NetOpen v3NetSend v3NetRecv v3NetSendUDP v3NetRecvUDP v3NetListen v3NetAccept v3NetClose v3NetDNS v3NetRevDNS v3NetMyIP v3NetACLAdd v3NetACLDelete v3NetACLTest v3NetACLFree
    What is buzzword-compliant around here?

  • Re:Next Distributed Project (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    $ which date
    /bin/date

    There you go.

  • heheh... New moderation option? (-1,Bad Pun) :-)
  • It's gonna take a lot more than the world's spare computing cycles to do that for you, buddy...
  • I knew the guy who founded Mithral, back when he was a bored CS geek at IIT who was running out of names, and I can confirm that your guess is correct.

    Hi, Adam!

  • Another distributed effort... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:53AM (#760897)
    "Fold proteins, find aliens, break crypto ... what else?" How about a distributed system where a given site is listed at a central site, and then everyone uses their machine to slow it down some with a few to many data requests... Oh, hang on - I'm already in this project (and so, dear reader, are you ;-) Regards, He who takes the time to smell the roses

  • One Idea...DivX (Score:5)

    by nebby ( 11637 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:53AM (#760898) Homepage
    Hey hey. I just was thinking the other day about how useful a distributed network would be for encoding DivX movies.. those things take FOREVER. We have a bunch of DVDs that we want in DivX so we can chop up the video and play with it (I have a digital camcorder and would love to try to put myself inside of "Die Hard", for example.)

    I was going to look into it (just split the job up over my LAN inside my house here with 6 computers) and it seems the solution has come to me.. whoop! Anyone have any specific ideas how to go about making this distributed DivX encoding software quickly, now that this package is out?

  • Hey,

    The Mithral Client Server Software Development Kit allows developers to quickly and easily write large scale client-server applications including "distributed computing" and peer-to-peer types. Examples of what this will allow you to build with this technology are distributed.net, SETI@Home, Napster, Gnutella, and hundreds of other applications. The example code is an instance of an application that hands out work for the clients to do, then collects the results.

    So will there now be [Number of Projects] * [Number of SETI@home users] users availiable now to run these programs, or will there be [Number of users] / [Number of projects] users, thus giving each project a fraction or the number or distributed computing users?

    Or all programmers going to have to build thier own cluster of computers to run thier programs on?

    Oh, that reminds me: Imagine a beowulf cluster of these (Or a beowulf cluster of clusters of these)!

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Interesting to see how mainstream distributed computing has become even in just the past 12 or so months. Fold proteins, find aliens, break crypto ... what else?

    What else?

    HOW ABOUT FINDING ME A GOD DAMN DATE?

  • What else? (Score:5)

    by TBHiX ( 26224 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:55AM (#760901) Homepage

    Hmmm... good questions. Wanna brainstorm on this thread?

    Believe it or not, I'm wondering if you could run a dating service or people-locator using a distibuted approach and, say, XML format. Create a file describing oneself and what/who they are seeking, then let the servers pass your profile around. If your "seeking" tags match someone's "is" tags, that profile is shuffled to you and yours is shuffled to the match.

    Man, I've mixed too much coffee and Yahoo Chat to have come up with that little frivolity... ;) Mind you, it doesn't have to be dating... employer/employee matching, activity planning ( seeking=rock concert when=yadda where=New York, etc), and similar things. All you have to agree on is the XML file format. (And the software can always hide the grubby details...)

    -TBHiX-

  • the answer (Score:3)

    by wishus ( 174405 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @11:35AM (#760902) Journal
    Fold proteins, find aliens, break crypto ... what else?

    The Answer!

    To Life... The Universe.. Everything!

    wish

    Vote for freedom! [harrybrowne2000.org]
    ---

  • MPAA lawyers issued a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of the piracy tool Mithral which, it is claimed, allows pirates to encode Divx copies of DVD films in only 20 seconds by using all of the bandwidth of the internet.
    In related news, the RIAA has gone after Compaq, Dell, IBM and HP, manufacturers of the widely-used piracy tool the personal computer. Jack Valenti, spokesdroid of the media-industrial complex, said today that 'these cases are another example of our zero-tolerance policy towards anyone threatening our inalienable right to foist N-Sync on an unsuspecting public. Anyone who resists will be ruthlessly crushed. We shall firewall them at the routers, we will firewall them on the servers, we will firewall them on their PCs but we will never, never surrender.....our right to abuse our market-position as we see fit'

  • Re:What else? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's all well and good, but searching ads doesn't require distributed computing. It requires 10 seconds on a 386.

  • Hmmm, maaaaaybe. Rendering a final, finished frame is out of the question. If the scene they're rendering requires, say, 300mb of textures... you'd need to D/L all 300MB in order to render that frame. Also, people would find a way to hack the returned stream to grab screenshots of movies before they're released...

    But maybe there's a way to have distributed clients work with some other CPU-intensive aspect of the rendering process. Radiosity calculations would be a good candidate! You wouldn't need to DL all the textures-- just the wireframe models, surface attribute info, and lighting info.

    That's still a lot of bandwidth, but it might actually be feasible with broadband connections...whatever... :)

  • it is very very cool.... fractal frame animations are extremely pretty. the only problems are choppy mpeg playback on linux in general (are there any really good mpeg players available?), or possibly that only a few of the animations have a lot of color in them. every now and then, I like to run electricsheep to watch the psychedelic dancing shapes.
  • As i recall, Mithral was a metal (to make mithral chain mail) in the Hobbit....As i recall, it was also the strongest and the best of all the chain mails....Is this in some way symbolic of the program itself? Or do we have some bored geeks that were running out of names and had just read LOTR recently?


  • Not Free Software (Score:3)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @10:57AM (#760908)
    He said you should be able to write a program over the weekend. That is assuming you have already written the software, and want to make it client-server. Otherwise, it's going to take you months of design and architecture just like any other program...

    If you do convert existing programs to use this software, you better have written it, because it's not compatible with the GPL (yet? They mentioned a dual license in the future):

    You may NOT make any change, removal or additions to the Software's underlying protocols or APIs without the prior written permission of Licensor.

    You will use your best efforts to discontinue the use and distribution of earlier versions of the Software once a new version, update or upgrade is available. You will also use your best efforts to distribute such new version, update or upgrade to any third party to whom you may have distributed an earlier version.
  • I'll have to see if I can find it again, but I remember not long ago, coming across something like this!

    I think it may have been a rendered, distributed flame fractal.

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