Darn. If you had brough it up before we could have done so, but now
that I've mentioned the Free Software Foundation to several people I'm
not going to back out.
However if there is sufficient interest in this project then when
it's done we could move on to the next one (which is 4 or 5 times
harder with a prize of $10000).
So far there are three people in the FoRK team: Wayne Baisley, Jesse
Vincent and myself. That's a start but thirty people would be much
better!
This is the biggest Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm calculation
ever, something like 20% of an exhaustive search of 56-bit DES. At
the current rate with a handful of people, the project would take 18
months. I'm about to announce it in some public fora so the rate
should increase dramatically, perhaps ten-fold.
Those who are interested should head over to:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~harley/ecdl6/
This seems more worthwhile to me than running distributed.net's 64-bit
RC5 thing (well it would, wouldn't it =:-) For a start it is actually
mathematically interesting with real algorithms instead of just
searching for a needle in a large hay-stack. It will also pay off
quickly, in something like two months, with prize money going to a
good cause.
Good luck,
Rob.
PS: The source runs out-of-the-box or with slight tweaks on Linux,
Solaris, *BSD, Digital Unix, Rhapsody etc. With a little porting
effort it compiles on lots of other stuff. It's running on x86,
Alpha, Sparc and ARM so far.
There's a Windows NT binary for all x86 chips >= 486.