At 11:46 AM 1999/09/26 +0100, you wrote:
>6) PrimeNet trial factoring has moved well into the 10 millions,
>however George's factor.zip file contains data only up to 10 million.
>I know there is a problem with uploading the large files concerned;
>hopefully, the suggestions above will help to reduce the size of the
>file, sufficiently to make it feasible to expand the exponent range
>to cover (at least) the active Primenet assignments for long enough
>for cheap, high-speed Internet connectivity to become widespread.
>
>7) I have several hundred megabytes of disk space available on my ftp
>server, which has reasonable Internet access - at least 8 Mbps
>connectivity to the Internet core - and would be happy to provide
>means for anyone interested to upload factoring data (or anything
>else, strictly relevant to Mersenne or closely-related numbers) for
>the purpose of making it publicly available.
I encourage you to implement this central repository.
Something that would have accelerated parts of the QA process is the
ability to query such an online resource for information such as the
following:
What is the smallest exponent larger than n that has no factor found
when factored to 2^m (possibly but not necessarily gimps default depth)?
What is the largest exponent smaller than n that has no factor found
when factored to 2^m?
What are the exponents with double checked residues between a and b?
What are the exponents with double checked residues between a and b
whose residues are from separate chip architectures and software
(Eg, Intel & prime95 for one, Alpha & MacLucasUnix for the other)?
What are the exponents with singly checked residues between a and b?
(I suppose one could consider doing very short factoring tests to fill
gaps when queries ask for an exponent's factor status; something like
up to 2^40, and add it to the database at that time; not a requirement.)
Something that might aid development of new prime search software
would be:
What are all the known factors larger than 2^m?
What are all the known factors between 2^m and 2^n for exponents between
a and b?
It is not the raw data, so much as the query response, that needs
human-readability.
Ken
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