I was given an old DEC AlphaServer. It has a 64-bit Alpha chip. The machine is running Windows NT 4 Server. Because the chipset is Alpha and NOT Intel, regular Windows executables won't run on it.
I'd love to use the power of this 64-bit AlphaServer to find the next Mersenne prime. I have had some problems getting flavors of Linux and Unix to run on this box. This is why I've gone back to the original OS of this server.
I am asking that the latest GIMPS client be ported to run on my DEC AlphaServer running Windows NT 4 Server.
The x86 version of GIMPS is heavily optimized with assembly code that has been highly tuned to the Pentium-II/-III FPU pipeline, as well as the the SSE SIMD operations of the P4. This task took many 1000s of man hours spread over a period of years by the project creator, George Woltman, and was only justifiable by the very large number of x86 systems out there.
The 'generic' version of mprime, with the Lucas Lehmer FFTs coded in C is considerably less efficient, however, it shouldn't be that hard to tweak a version of `mprime` to run as a alpha windows command line program, if you have a C compiler for it.
I'm curious what clock speed your Alphaserver runs at? I believe those topped out at around 1Ghz, with most of them in the 200-600Mhz range, and even with the Alpha's relatively high MFlop/Mhz ratio, they still can't compete with todays $600 PCs running 3000MHz P4's. This would make it rather hard to justify the porting effort for a single server.
btw, I hope you're not going to hook that Alphaserver up to the internet without a thorough external firewall, all development on security updates For Alpha/NT was stopped when Compaq acquired DEC, rendering it quite risky to use even for internet web browsing. For sure, do not use Internet Explorer.
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