Geneology of some projects

The following are personal observations of Adam L. Beberg. Standard disclaimer, yadda yadda. Lighten up.

OK, someone had to do it. With all the "cycle selling" efforts out there, (my list is now at 19 quasi-commercial ones) not all of them mentioned here because some people just take things the wrong way. I decided the claims of "unique/original business plans" are getting so funny that I had to write up a list of who came when and who they most directly decended from. Please don't take this too seriously, the dates aren't exact, and who knows how it happens that "project X looks exactly the same as project Y". This will be very useful for reporters and investors doing due diligence as well.

The List

In approximate date order, as best I can do. I was there for all this, in fact I note what I was doing at some times, so it should be fairly close give or take a few months.

• DCS - (1973 - *) The fully working distributed computing system that I consider the grandfather of just about everything today. It now being 2000, any and all patent claims to anything in the field of distributed computing are pure BS, woohoo! Around the same time systems with a GUI and a 2Mbit network connection were also around. Oddly enough, I was also born in this year - so far nothing has changed.
• Much time passes, cant say I was paying attention much.
• Globus and Legion started back in here I think, the 2 major distributed computing research projects, if you have a supercomputer and Internet-2, you should be using one of these.
• ~1991 - I start doing distributed raytracing and things on Novell networks. And in my day we didn't have no stinking toolkits! I start paying attention to things, goto college, catch up to what happened since 1973, etc.
• ~1995 - Cosm is born, originally an OS design based on Mach, QNX, and dozen other research designs in distributed operating systems.
• GIMPS (Jan 96 - now) - Effort to find large Mersenne primes coordinated with email originally. Currently rewards from the EFF are offered for newer huge primes. Client-server.
• DESCHALL (? - ?) - Effort to break DES, a 56 bit algorithm, contest sponsored by RSA. Client-server.
• OGR (Jul 97 - May 99) Optimal Golomb Rulers, now a distributed.net project. Client-server.
• Genx - (feb 97-mar 97) RC5-56 effort, another 56bit. Inspired by DESCHALL and also another RSA challenge. Died a horrible death of DoS attacks between waring teams. Client-server.
• distributed.net - (May 97 - Nov 98) Picked up where Genx died with RC5-56 after Bovine wrote proxys/servers and I designed clients and stats. Originially intended as a general framework, but. Client-server.
• "v3" - (Oct 1997 - *) Cosm first talked about publicly, known as "v3" at the time. Somewhere in that 2 years I gave up on the OS idea, realizing that they were now commodities, so there was no point.
• PiHex - (Apr 98 - now) Calculating digits of Pi. Client-server.
• ECDL - (??? ?? - done) Eliptic curve contest. Client-server.
• entropia.com (early 98 - now) - A automated Win32 server for the GIMPS project, taken commercial but only serving GIMPS. Client-server. Commercial.
• ... Up until about this point, everyone talked to everyone else. Now only a few talk anymore.
• DCTI - (Nov 98 - now) distributed.net officially becomes Distributed Computing Technologies, Inc. (DCTI), a non-profit organization in the eyes of the government, when the paperwork finally clears. Client-server.
• SETI@Home - (Jan 99 - now) Hunting alien signals from space. Around for since 1996, SETI actually starts public betas. Client-server.
• Cosm - (Apr 99 - now) Cosm splits from distributed.net as d.net wants to go a different direction. "v3" dies, and Cosm is announced as a separate project. Development continues in public. Fully distributed computing. Commercial but free for many uses (with source!).
• Casino-21 - (Apr 99? - now) Climate modeling.
• ... During the summer of 99 SETI gets very popular and everyone starts yelling "me too, me too". The words "like SETI@Home does" start to appear everywhere.
• dcypher - (??? 99 - now) A direct distributed.net decendant run by a disgruntled distributed.net participant. Competed at CSC for a while, then moved on to gamma flux. Now working with ProcessTree. Client-server. Commercial.
• ProcessTree - (??? 00 - now) Just a list of names until joining with dcypher. Client-server. Commercial.
• Porivo - (Feb 00 - now) SETI/distributed.net clone run by 3 marketing guys. Client-server. Commercial.
• PopularPower - (Mar 00? - now) DESCHALL/distributed.net decendant. Based on Macromedia Flash/Java. Client-server. Commercial.
• Centrata - (May 00 - now) A Porivo clone put together for MIT's 50k contest. "patent pending". Commercial.
• ... And many more I left out, but more to come I'm sure.