> A) A doublechecking cleanup team of computers. A team of (say) five
> PIII-500s, 64MB SRAM and suitable motherboards, with cheap everything else
> (cases, etc, and probably only one old monitor to share among them all)
I'd rather drop to PII-400. The memory bus speed is the same, so the
PIII-500 will not be as much as 25% faster. You might see 15% if
you're lucky. A "retail box" PII-400 is less than half the price of a
PIII-500, so you will probably find that you could build (at least) 5
complete PII-400 systems for the price of 4 PIII-500s, and end up
with more total power for less expense. Plus, you'd have more upgrade
potential, when faster processors come down to a sane price.
You might get even more "bangs per buck" by using Celeron 400
processors, though these will be less quick than PII-400 (Celeron
memory bus is only 66 MHz) and will have less upgrade potential
(seems impossible to get Slot 1 Celerons these days, and the Socket
370 to Slot 1 converters may have a reliability penalty, from what
some people say) Again, the price premium on the faster Celerons is
not justified by the small increase in performance.
Since you're only going for 64 MB RAM (more than sufficient) I'd
reccomend spending a little extra on ECC SDRAM (obviously only
applicable to PII/PIII systems, no support on Celeron). This should
make the system a deal less likely to produce wrong results as a
consequence of random hardware glitches.
And fit a UPS, or at least a decent mains surge suppressor.
> If the "owners" of
> those exponents are annoyed, we can credit them for the CPU time they've
> invested, or give them another exponent, etc.
If you really are going ahead with this, I think you should agree
formally to do something about sharing the credit/any prize money
etc., should it be found that one of the exponents you have "poached"
from its "rightful owner" actually generates a Mersenne prime.
Finally, I think you should make determined efforts to contact any
user who has an assignment allocated to them through official
channels before you "poach" it. Out of sheer courtesy, if nothing
else.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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