Robert van der Peijl wrote:
> Now, everybody, _PLEASE_:
> If you're thinking <<How about a nifty gadget such-and-such?>>.
> Let's NOT send all THAT to the mailing list!
> The list would get swamped in tons of traffic. So please, okay?
Though you ask this, I find the topic rather appropriate for the list,
especially given the angle of "HOW can we visualize the process of
mathemathical operations?". So, unless somebody comes up with a better
avenue for discussing it, or threatens me with a hammer, I'll take my
best shot... It's _not_ a call for discussion of every little knob and
letter
in the proposed GUI, though!
Actually, the main reason I do is because there's something I've been
for long hoping from the "distributed computing" projects, in vain...
Something so obivious and simple I'm wondering why it hasn't already
been included, if it's just me or... Oh well ;) Anyway, rather than keep
you all in suspense, which sounds tempting too, I'll just tell it since
I'm dying to see this one out there: How about a grpah of how much
CPU-time the calculations are taking?
One of the strongest drawbacks to the various distributed computing
projects is that there's simply no way to know how much CPU your "real
work" is takng at any given time, it's just 100% CPU utilization all the
time. This is pretty dumb, especially when you have a program running
that seems to know just how much spare time there is in the system at
any given time.
Now, for the Unix client there's a real problem here. Yes, I agree the
main client should be a console application. I'm wondering if it's
possible to build an executable that runs both console and X, though..?
The big problem is that we don't have enough data outside of the program
to draw almost any graphics... getting the structure-definitions of the
intermediary files could be a good start, though.
Other suggestions for graphics: (Comments in private, though,
preferably, if there's anything new coming out I can post summaries).
I'd work on this myself if I had the time and source, being I don't...
- progress bars like "Go!Zilla", using various bitmaps that are slowly
revealed. Images related to computer & math theory would be preferred.
- comparements to "worst competitors" on the CPU-years category etc,
preferably with runnign real-time stats, which brings us to...
- simple chat system. With the Internet connectivity routines already in
place, allowing chatting with other people running the Prime95/mprime
client shouldn't be much of a chore.
- for checking large Mersenne numbers, I think the only kind of "status
display" really making sense would be a multi-color graph of the status
of the full Mersenne search.
Many of these suggestions seem to also require changes to the existing
PrimeNet server, or even a new server to take off some of the
"non-essential chores" like the competitors & world check status
displays, which is another reason why I think this can't be just
brainstormed in private, disconnected from all the rest of the GIMPS
effort, like we were operating in a vacuum.
-Donwulff
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