Hi Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry that I reply so late but I had some exams last week. Organisation of p-1 factoring: The factoring is mainly done by George Woltman and Alex Kruppa. George ran p-1 on the exponents 20000 to 110000 using B1=1M; B2=40M, and Alex did the p-1 from 150000 to 600000 using B1=100k; B2=4M (still in progress). Both have kept the save files. George told me that Alex is starting at 110000 and Alex reported me 150000. It seems as if a little misunderstanding caused a gap between these two values. At the moment the situation is quite simple. If a lot of other people intend to do further p-1 factoring, Brian Beesley is willing collect these information and put onto his ftp server. I think that is not necessary at the moment to store the save files online. But a database with the limits makes sense. Everyone who wants to do some further p-1 factoring can request the files from Alex and George then. > However, it must be pointed out that at some point you are better off > switching to ECM rather than expanding the P-1 bounds. I'm not sure > what that point is. (George) When we take some exponents and spend as much time in the further p-1 factoring as in the ECM on them , we can find out which approach brings more factors. George told me that 1 B1=250k ECM curve is worth 5 curves using a 50k bound. If it is similar in p-1 factoring, further p-1 factoring will be better than ECM, but I don't think so due to the internal structure of the factors found by p-1. Parallel use of p-1 and trial factoring: When we change between these two methods during the factoring, we can optimise the average time to find a factor. It makes no sense to split up the assignment in more than two pieces (p-1 and trial). An idea is to make three types of assignments: 1. trial factoring for computers which have not much memory. 2. p-1 factoring for which have a lot of memory. 3. complete factoring (p-1 and trial) for the average computers which run all the time. These computers change between factoring when it is in use and p-1 during the night. Regards Reto _________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
