Hi,
Coincidentally to Peter's message, and as an encouragement to
anyone else working in this field, it just so happens that one of my
systems discovered a previously unknown (AFAIK) factor of one of
the Cunningham Project numbers yesterday evening:
[Fri Sep 07 21:33:06 2001]
ECM found a factor in curve #199, stage #2
Sigma=6849154397631118, B1=3000000, B2=300000000.
UID: beejaybee/Simon2, P1136 has a factor:
9168689293924594269435012699390053650369
Factors this size aren't too easy to find, but (despite the subject
line in Peter's message) there are still a large number of
candidates which need work done on them.
FWIW if you have a dual CPU system (mine is running 2 * PIII-850
on a Supermicro P6DBE m/b), running ECM on small exponents
on one processor makes an ideal foil to running LL tests on the
other. The ECM process uses so little memory that it runs
practically in the L2 cache, except during Stage 2. The LL test will
slow down a bit during ECM stage 2, but that's only about 30% of
the time - whereas running LL tests on both processors can slow
both processes down quite substantially due to the loading on the
memory bus.
BTW this was found with Prime95 v21.2, so I guess that's another
check mark on the QA table: ECM _does_ find factors!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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