Mersenne Digest Sunday, 7 February 1999 Volume 01 : Number 506
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Brian J Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 10:07:25 GMT
Subject: Re: Mersenne: PrimeNet productivity
Sander Hoogendoorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> This page also shows that the number of inactive accounts is
raising
> harder then the active accounts.
I'm not totally surprised at this. So long as the number of active
accounts keeps rising, we aren't in trouble. Especially as the
average power of computers keeps rising.
Probably most of the "drop outs" are people who have a single PC
which is now getting older & so less able to cope with the longer
assignments which are now the order of the day.
> Since the last newsletter was from may
> 22 (or did i miss one?) it might be a good idea for a new one to wake
> all these people because not all people who are testing are members of
> this mailing list
Are you volunteering to write one?
Good point, actually. If a significant number of users have dropped
out because assignments now take so much longer, perhaps they
should be made aware of the relatively new "double checking"
project. My guess is that the accounts which have recently
become "inactive" are the people who were giving up just before
V17 became available.
Could I suggest that we mail (just once) all the inactive accounts
with an announcement of V17, and the consequent release of
relatively small exponents for double-checking. PrimeNet should
have the e-mail addresses of these people. If we could attract 10%
of these people back into the project, it would be worthwhile.
Regards
Brian Beesley
------------------------------
From: "mdennis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 99 07:08:13 EDT
Subject: Mersenne: automated response
I am away and will return February 6. Mike Dennis
------------------------------
From: "Scott Kurowski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 04:10:55 -0800
Subject: Mersenne: RE: etc. & PrimeNet productivity
Hi all,
> >There are 3 SunOS workstations in this office that sit doing little
> >more than reading and displaying files - so they can be kept busy
> >testing for primes.
>
> You can always try to compile mprime on these. The network code might need
> platform-specific tweaking but the guts of the primality testing stuff
> ought to be portable C.
MPrime's Intel assembly code will be tough to build on a Sun. Michiel Van
Loon's PrimeOS2 implementation of PrimeNet's network layer might be more
portable.
> Today, Primenet status page contains:
(cut)
> 50.314 years/day !!!
>
> It seems that a massive number of new members have sent results.
Interpretation of the CPU rate figures is dependent upon the date stamps below
the subheadings and at the top of the summary report. In the example 50+ years
accumulated over 32 hours instead of the usual 24 hours. 37.8 years/day was the
interesting figure, not far from the week average of 38.
[Gary:]
> This appears to be a glitch in the program. The "CPU years" cannot be
> greater than the "CPU yr/day".
Actually, operator intervention. As Gary later pointed out, the time stamps and
daily cumulative count can on occasion skip a day but the CPU rates remain
normalized. In this particular case, the server was offline at 06:00 UTC/GMT
(22:00 Pacific) for a snapshot test copy of its database for the new 4.0
server's final tests. It caused the server to miss its daily self-maintenance
pass that updates the stats.
(The daily CPU rate also varies cyclically throughout the day and week. To see
a graph of the daily cycle, see http://entropia.com/ips/stats.html for an
analysis of PrimeNet's first 7 months. The 7-day average CPU yr/day and GFLOP/s
rates smooth out the daily spikes and dips, and is what Entropia.com pays most
attention to.)
The current stats show an additional CPU yr/day is coming in now relative to a
few days ago:
*** Aggregate CPU Statistics, P90 Units ***
Last 7 Days Average Cumulative Today
from 99-Jan-28 06h from 99-Feb-04 06h
Test Type CPU yr/day GFLOP/s CPU years CPU yr/day
- ------------ ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
Lucas-Lehmer 37.489 451.287 8.586 41.510
Factoring 1.457 17.536 0.255 1.235
---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
TOTALS 38.946 468.823 8.842 42.745
> This page also shows that the number of inactive accounts is raising
> harder then the active accounts. Since the last newsletter was from may
> 22 (or did i miss one?) it might be a good idea for a new one to wake
> all these people because not all people who are testing are members of
> this mailing list
The inactive accounts figure is not as meaningful as originally conceived. We
removed it from the 4.0 server's status page, which if you don't mind ignoring
bogus test data is at:
http://207.104.25.139/primenet/status.shtml
A few people quit GIMPS but the vast majority are simply changing account IDs
and leaving the old ones behind. In contrast to this, PrimeNet has seen a net
average of 21 people join GIMPS every day for over the last year.
- -----
In other PrimeNet news, the new 4.0 server is in final configuration and testing
this week and part of next, and the PrimeNet proxy server beta is running
successfully at almost all of the test sites that signed up. We expect to cut
over to the new system right after Internet verification completes with a final
database snapshot.
Regards,
scott
(for the Entropia.com team)
------------------------------
From: Spike Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 22:52:31 -0800
Subject: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #505
>...predictions on when the whole range up to 20,500,000 will be:
>3) completely double-checked?
> ...[Gary Untermeyer] predicts that all of the above will be
> accomplished in under 10 years. Any comments?
this seems a little underoptimistic. i predict the linear growth trend given
as 0.0881x - 1.8611 where x is days after 23 nov 97 and y is p90 cpu years
will continue. this growth trend predicts finishing the 2.05E7 range on
1 july, 2007. i predict we will get there by 1 january 2007. spike jones
------------------------------
From: Paul Derbyshire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 1999 07:37:17 -0500
Subject: Mersenne: What the...?
Prime95 finally contacted the server, and this appeared promptly in my
worktodo.ini:
DoubleCheck=2224517,58
Hmm... That should run quick, but I had thought I had set up for fresh
exponent LL testing only? I guess it mixes first time and second time LL
tests and hands them out.
Not complaining, just curious...
- --
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
- -() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." -------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot |http://surf.to/pgd.net
_____________________ ____|________ Paul Derbyshire [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|
------------------------------
From: "Clayton Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 15:49:09 -0500
Subject: Mersenne: Laptop use...
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
- ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BE51E8.3BFC0FF0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Just a quick question:
Does running Prime95 have any noticable effect on laptop battery life?
- - Clayton Smith
- ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BE51E8.3BFC0FF0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META content=3Dtext/html;charset=3Diso-8859-1 =
http-equiv=3DContent-Type>
<META content=3D'"MSHTML 4.72.3110.7"' name=3DGENERATOR>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000 size=3D2>Just a quick question:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000 size=3D2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000 size=3D2>Does running Prime95 have any =
noticable effect=20
on laptop battery life?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000 size=3D2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000 size=3D2>- Clayton =
Smith</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>
- ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BE51E8.3BFC0FF0--
------------------------------
From: Paul Derbyshire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 17:18:57 -0500
Subject: Re: Mersenne: What the...?
At 08:32 PM 2/5/99 -0000, you wrote:
>No. The system calculates its speed as (clock rate) * (hours per day) / 24.
>Divided by a "fiddle factor" which is about 2 for AMD processors and about
7 for
>Cyrix and 486 processors (FPU efficiency...)
>
>If the speed is >133 MHz and you've left the test type selection as
default, then
>it should find you a "first time" LL test. If >75 MHz but <= 133 MHz then
you get
>a double check. If <=75MHz then factoring.
Well I have a Pentium: no fiddle factor. It's 166 MHz and I have 24 h/day
set, so I should have my speed calculated as a clean 166.
>If you're at all concerned, mail me your local.ini & prime.ini files &
I'll try to
>come up with a logical explanation. (You may censor personal
identification data
>if you wish - actually the only thing I need from prime.ini is the
WorkPreference
>line)
The line in question says WorkPreference=0. There is only one
WorkPreference line, no duplicates with conflicting values.
Local.Ini says CPUType=5 and CPUSpeed=166.It has SelfTestnnnPassed=0 for
nnn = 64, 60, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, and 256. CPUHours=24. Various
RollingAverages and EndDatesSent stuff. And SelfTest320Passed=1.
- --
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
- -() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." -------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot |http://surf.to/pgd.net
_____________________ ____|________ Paul Derbyshire [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Programmer & Humanist|ICQ: 10423848|
------------------------------
From: George Woltman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 22:22:45 -0500
Subject: Re: Mersenne: What the...?
Hi,
At 05:18 PM 2/6/99 -0500, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
>If the speed is >133 MHz and you've left the test type selection as
>default, then it should find you a "first time" LL test.
>If >75 MHz but <= 133 MHz then you get a double check.
>If <=75MHz then factoring.
Sort of. When the program was first released this was true. I made
the 133 number slide upwards to 200 over the next year (because I
expected we'd be moving on to even larger FFT lengths). It seems that
at the present date the crossover point is now very close to 166MHz.
Best regards,
George
------------------------------
End of Mersenne Digest V1 #506
******************************
