Team Distributed
Distributed Computing Project
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Our Mission
Our mission is to demonstrate the power of distributed computing to solve the RSA
Laboratories Factoring challenge.
Coordinating the combined computational resources of hundreds of idle computers, our team members install and run a small utility program on their computers to make use of idle cpu cycles when their computers are sitting idle (for example overnight)
Labelled with ICRA
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What is the RSA Laboratories Factoring Challenge?
RSA Laboratories continues its sponsorship of the RSA Factoring Challenge to encourage research into computational number theory and the practical difficulty of factoring large integers. The information received during this challenge is a valuable resource to the cryptographic community and can be helpful for users of the RSA public-key cryptosystem in choosing suitable key lengths for an appropriate level of security.
The RSA Challenge numbers are the kind we believe to be the hardest to factor; these numbers should be particularly challenging. These are the kind of numbers used in devising secure RSA cryptosystems.
A cash prize is awarded to the first person to factor each challenge number. The prize amount is listed on the page with the challenge number. Prizes range from $10,000 (US) for the 576-bit challenge to $200,000 for 2048 bits. The prize money will be paid once RSA Laboratories has verified the correctness of the factorization. For more information: http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/factoring/index.html
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What is in it for me?
It’s fun. There are cool stats. RSA Labs is offering a cash prize to the organization or team who ‘finds’ the winning key. That’s reason enough to run an unobtrusive little program in the background on your computer, at least to us anyway. Plus, the stats are pretty cool. Not only do we compete as a team with all the other RC5 teams, but we compete against one another for the top spots within the team. Regardless of what the hippies might say, competition is GOOD. And what better benchmark for your system than something that runs ALL the time? Did we mention the cool stats? Check out the Join The Team link on this site for instructions on how to join!
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