The most powerful supercomputer currently operational (according to
www.top500.org) is ASCI Red, with a maximum speed of 1.8 TFLOPS.
According to PrimeNet, the average throughput of the GIMPS project is 361.328
GFLOPS (7 day average from Nov 2). PrimeNet has 5749 active accounts. Hrm. Not
bad. That's about 62.8 MFLOPS on the part of every active account. How many
active accounts would be required to get to the speed of ASCI Red? About
29,000. GIMPS needs to be about 5 times larger than it is right now to match
the speed of ASCI Red. Wicked.
So... P5 90Mhz = 32.98 MFLOP units is the standard, so everyone runs, on
average, a Pentium 171. Hrm. Wonder how well GIMPS could do if everyone had
PII 400Mhz processors? According to the chart at
http://www2.tripnet.se/~nlg/mersenne/benchmk.htm, P90s get .778 on the same
range that PII 400Mhzs get .155. (I'm using this conservative value instead of
the .143.) That means that PIIs are 5x faster than P90s. And they're 2.63x
faster than P171s, which is the average GIMPS processor. So if everyone just
upgraded their system to that PII 400Mhz system, GIMPS speed could be ***more
than doubled***. Ah, living in a fantasy world is great.
Now, how can we make this more easily accomplished than waiting or by massive
upgrading? I'll leave that for you to think about. :-D
STL
Hint... publicity....
