Mersenne: GIMPS and other distributed projects

[Francois LeBlanc]

Hello all, I have been lurking on this mailing list for a while now and wish to comment on a suggestion that was made a while back.  Someone said that maybe a sizeable portion of the GIMPS participants were Seti@Home dropouts and regardless of it's questionable chance of success, that project is contributing greatly to the development of distributed computing on the internet.     I agree with this.  Personally, I first joined S@H because it was the only distributed project I was aware of and I found that very concept (distributed computing) very appealing.  Since then, I have switched to GIMPS for several reasons. 1- It is easy to use: no need for manual communication like some of the more obscure mathematical problems. 2- I found the work worthwhile compared to searching for an impropable Alien radio signal or doing brainless code cracking which has no real scientific value. 3- Perphaps most important of all, the Seti servers are always having problems because there is so much interest in the project (leading me to believe that my work is superfluous).  Furthermore, the program used is badly unoptimised (the Olli patch made quite a scandal) and  it could be optimised very easily (replace the FFT routine). This is further proof that my time there was not really needed. For some reason, I have considered the decision of choosing which other project to join to be an important one (even though I only have a Pentium 200).  I might however switch to www.processtree.com (my partner # is 5766 for those interested) which plans on paying people for their computer's time (very appealing) or Cosm (cosm.mthral.org) which are going to do lots of things and seem to me very organised. It's creator helped launch ditributed.net.       On another note, I want to convince my University faculty (Science) to run Prime 95 in the computer labs.  How can I prove that the client will not affect the performance of the computers; even the old Pentium 60ish. I'm not sure if I believe that myself.  And at what speed do computers start being automatically assigned factoring assignments.  Do you have suggestions on how to accomplish this? I've already spoken to a technician but he wasn't very collaborative, saying that all sorts of permissions were needed but I haven't given up yet.   Francois LeBlanc