I am looking for about 20-50 additional ambitious & very patient QA testers
with extremely fast hardware, and some significant free storage space, to
participate in runs on selected exponents in the larger fft runlengths.
The selected exponents will frequently be fully trial factored, or nearly so.
Though many may be prime95 or mprime users, this is not a requirement, and
participation of users on nonIntel cpus is encouraged.
Participants in this phase of the QA should be willing to coordinate with
a partner, running LLtests and double-checks of the same exponent in parallel,
and cc George Woltman and myself, interim residues at suitable intervals.
Interim files (which can each be sizable) should be preserved until interim
residues of a later interim check are known to match. (Ideally all interim
files would be kept, at intervals of 1-2 million iterations, until an
exponent is completed & double checks ok.)
Participants should agree to sign on for at least 6 months, preferably much
longer, and to transmit the last valid intermediate file or interim file to
an ftp server if quitting, or when necessary for debugging.
(Note, the upper end, 79,300,000, takes an estimated 6.5 years on a
PentiumII-400, nonstop.)
Participants should agree to install version upgrades that may be required
from time to time, waiting a day or more to ensure it's a stable version,
and migrate the tests in progress to their fastest
available hardware as hardware upgrades are made.
(It may be possible to get partial cpu-time credit for partially LLtesting
an exponent that is then completed by someone else but this is not guaranteed.
This could be an extra administrative headache for George Woltman and myself.)
In exchange for all this time and trouble, testers will have a reduced
chance of finding a prime and a delay in receiving cpu credit (due to the
long runtimes), but get a shot at completing primality tests of exponents
unlikely to be surpassed for some time.
The purposes of this endeavor are:
1) Add to the list of known, checked residues, some entries in currently
very sparse or completely empty runlengths (ahead of checkout & result
return by typical GIMPS & Primenet users) for qualification of v19 prime95
& its variants, future versions, & other software.
2) Verify the long term operation accuracy of prime95 v19 and its relatives
(and later versions) in the new longer runlengths.
3) Gain experience with the tandem-running approach.
4) Have fun.
Volunteers, please respond by email to me with the following information:
Your full name
your email address
your preferred runlength(s)
how many exponents you'd like to take on in each runlength
Description of cpus available for QA testing, as in the hypothetical
example below, to judge suitability of cpus for various exponents:
Name CPU OS RAM available (hr/day)/(day/wk)
xyz PII-500 WinNT (build 1381 SP5) 128MB 24/7
a Alpha21264-600 TruUnix Vxxx 512MB 15/5 +24/2
5; various Celeron500 Win95 128MB 24/7
omega 4xPIII-600 WinNT 4sp5+hotfixes 256MB 24/7
(CPU descriptions will not be shared among participants or with the mail
list.)
Ken
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