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Distributed Computing for rollouts

Posted By: Jason Lee
Date: Wednesday, 14 January 2009, at 12:07 a.m.

Stick has been nicely organizing a collaborative rollout project of positions in several books, and it seems to be going pretty well.

I got to thinking about distributed computing, in the vein of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (http://www.mersenne.org/). A Mersenne prime is a number of the form 2^p - 1 that is itself prime. These are the typical huge prime numbers that are discovered. At the moment, the largest known prime number is a Mersenne prime.

The project has thousands of people searching for Mersenne primes. There is an algorithm that detects the primality of candidate numbers, and the GIMPS project has created software that runs quietly in the background on your computer, stealing clock cycles whenever they're free. The program is very robust -- I've never detected it bogging anything down, so it plays nicely with taking processor time only when it's free. It's completely automated... when the program is done checking a number (which can take months), it automatically gets new work to do. It's literally zero maintenance on my part.

There are other distributed computing projects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects), such as protein folding and semi-serious stuff like SETI.

So, the obvious question is this: what would be the barriers to trying to implement GNUBG as a distributed computing project? The advantages would include:

  • A well written implementation would make things easy on the user -- no restarting rollouts because my computer decided to reboot.
  • No idle time -- a clock cycle is a terrible thing to waste.
  • Better automation from the point of view of the person coordinating the project (such as Stick, in the case of these rollout projects)

Since I don't know anything about the programming of GNUBG (or of any sort of distributed programming projects in general), I don't know what the obstacles are. I imagine they're serious, and maybe this is pie in the sky.

Thoughts?

JLee

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