Dear Mersenners: The source and binaries for selected platforms of Mlucas 2.7a are now available: see ftp://209.133.33.182/pub/mayer/README.html Major changes from v2.7z include: 1) v2.7a has a radix-9 FFT pass capability. This allows one to go from FFT lengths of (say) 256K and 512K to 288K and 576K, rather than having to jump all the way up to 320K and 640K, respectively. This will save folks double-checking exponents above 5.15M or first- time testing above 10.11M anywhere from 12-20% runtime, depending on the FFT length and the platform. For example, Brian Beesley was able to do a double-check of an exponent ~5.6M in just 8 days on his 533MHz Alpha PC164; that exponent would have taken 10 days using v2.7z. 2) v2.7a now allows users to concatenate several partially-completed exponents and their associated savefiles into a single directory; as the code gets to each new exponent in the worktodo.ini file, it first checks to see if there are any savefiles (v2.7z did this only at on program startup, i.e. for the first entry in the .ini file.) Thanks to Siegmar Szlavik for suggesting this. 3) I've condensed some near-repeat code sequences in the carry and wrapper/pointwise-square routines in an effort to reduce their code footprint and thus improve instruction cache usage. Some platforms (Alpha ev4 and ev6, Sparc) benefit from this; on others (Alpha ev5 and MIPS) it seems to make little or no difference. V2.7a is a drop-in replacement for 2.7z; I suggest users upgrade at their earliest convenience, so as to have the radix-9 capability ready when the PrimeNet server starts handing out exponents in the aforementioned ranges, which will occur in the near future. As usual, many thanks to Bill Rea and Brian Beesley, my Sparc and Alpha Linux "compile czars," for the binaries and tunings for those platforms. Happy hunting, -Ernst p.s.: For those of you confused by my code numbering convention: I use the suffixes x, y and z to label beta versions of the code, thus z (if I choose to use it) comes before a. _________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
