GPU File Distributor

The File Distributor is a set of PHP scripts that can be used by any centralized or P2P based project to download files (work units), to mark them as processed and to report results in form of strings. FD works through Apache and is backed by a mySQL database. To get it working, you should at best install first XAMPP on your Linux or Windows computer, then download the FD source code here.

You can see FD in action here. Feel free to experiment on that page, the administrator password is provided if you login. Read the FD manual, if you want to install it on one of your servers.

To start, we provide a Standalone File Distributor Client, which is easy to configure. It can download work units and the zipped application. It launches the application, collects results and uploads them to a defined FTP server. The standalone client is here (for Windows).

A more complex way to interact with FD is to interface the GPU client with the File Distributor. You should choose Tabs->GPU Engine->Basic Plugins and read carefully the documentation for the filedistributor.dll and downloader.dll plugins after you updated to a version greater equal than 0.945. With filedistributor.dll you can integrate your application inside the framework with no effort. If you use downloader.dll instead, you can write your own GPU plugin that crunches data. Or you can use applauncher.dll to launch an external executable that crunches the work unit and uploader.dll to upload results to a FTP server.

If you prefer, you can directly interface the independent client you developed for the File Distributor: you need no more than libraries which can download a URL with HTTP and libraries which can read a text file or parse an XML file. To avoid overloading the webserver with requests, your client should wait a random amount of time before requesting the URL in a time window of say 10 seconds. If you get a timeout, you should then double the time window where the random URL access is done. This mechanism is called exponential waiting.

Contact our mailing list for questions and help.

Current status (June 07): FD has XML job description and supports executables as .zip and ftp upload settings. A GPU plugin dedicated to the latest version is written and passed all tests on autoupdate. A standalone client for FD is compiled as well. Statistics for users reporting data is available on the File Distributor server, along with uptime/online information.