Whether the "humble joe" feels like his contribution is important or
not, I don't know, but the fact is that his contribution is important.
About a year ago, I compared the CPU time recorded by the top 100
contributors to the total. It was about 50%. I repeated the excercise
a couple of months ago, comparing the total CPU hours per day estimate
for the top 100 primenet contributors to the total daily output of
primenet. That time it was 25% of the time comes from the top 100
participants. So the "individual" members contribute most of the time,
and the next Mersenne Prime is more likely than not to come from someone
past 100 in the rankings.
But I'll still be sad when I am no longer in first place!!
Gordon Spence wrote:
>What bothers me most I guess is that the ordinary humble joe in the street
>being realistic has no chance whatever of finding the next mersenne prime.
>Over-reacting? maybe, but when people like templeu have over 300 machines
>of PPRO200/PII300+ running think about it. They are generating about 14
>months of cpu per day.
>If we are going to continue to recruit new *individual* members or thos
>like me who can get time on a few computers as opposed to hundreds then
>shouldn't we be thinking about splitting the rankings based on the numbers
>of machines being used.
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