wee doors banging

The keyserver says: have run out of OGR-P2 work

X-ray crystallographers, radio astronomers and fans of distributed computing efforts alike – rejoice! distributed.net has successfully completed it’s long running “OGR-25” project to harness the spare capacity of hundreds of thousands of ordinary computers around the world to exhaustively determine the optimal 25-mark Golomb Ruler.

Think Folding@Home for maths geeks.

The result of over eight years number crunching by the distributed.net network was to prove that the shortest previously known 25-mark Golomb Ruler was, in fact, the shortest possible at length 480. It was also proved to be a unique solution. Proving this is important for reasons that I won’t even pretend to understand, but they assure me that it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, in all its glory, the optimal 25-mark Golomb Ruler:

0 12 29 39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396 431 459 467 480

Wow.

I’ve been a long time contributor and sometime programmer for distributed.net’s projects. My contributions to OGR-25 (PDF) placed me 1,125th out of all 124,387 participants, with a total of 4,204,856,130,378,590 (4.2 quadrillion) “nodes” tested by the various machines that I’ve pressed into service over the 3,002 days I was part of the project. That’s 0.00795% of the total project work (PDF) .

distributed.net’s RC5-72 Secret Key Challenge project continues on and they will soon be announcing a new project to take the place of OGR-25, a “next-generation OGR project that will further the exploration into even higher-order Optimal Golomb Rulers”. Right now I’ve no further details on what this new project will be, but I’m looking forward to hearing more and I’ve no doubt that I’ll be throwing a few (more) spare CPU cycles their way in the not too distant future.

Moo!