RE: Mersenne: Hyperthreading ABIT IS7
This is a question that has come up before. In a multi-processor system, the CPU graph in Task Manager will count *ALL* the processors as being equal to 100%. You can set Task Manager to show one graph per CPU which should help. *** Also, be sure you set the Affinity of Prime95 to run on ONLY the first CPU (the real one)! *** Otherwise the task scheduler could be switching your process between the real and virtual processor and that will seriously gum up how well it runs, especially for CPU intensive tasks like P95 is. In the P4's with the virtual processor, it will appear to the OS as 2 processors, but trust me, running 2 instances of Prime95 will not help. It does help out though when you run Prime95 and are using your machine for other things... You'll get more Prime95 cycles going and your other tasks can run in the virtual processor pretty well without robbing cycles from the LL tests. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Terry S. Arnold Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 8:24 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Hyperthreading ABIT IS7 I just brought up a new box with P4 3.0 on an ABIT IS MB. I only appear to be getting 50% of the cycles for Prime95. I am running XP Pro SP1. How do I get the full power available to Prime95? Terry _Terry S. Arnold 2975 B Street San Diego, CA 92102 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (619) 235-8181 (voice) (619) 235-0016 (fax) __ ___ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: 50% CPU?
Pentium 4's use hyperthreading to give you a 'virtual' second CPU. Don't bother trying to get another instance of Prime95 running on that 2nd CPU... It's virtual and while a lot of programs can benefit, the extreme workout that Prime95 generates means you won't get a benefit from running a second copy. It does mean that running a single instance as usual will, in theory, work even better because a lot more of the OS related things or if you use the computer to run Word, Excel or whatever will work better because those can now use the virtual CPU for a lot more things. And the reason it shows 50% is because Task Manager adds up all the CPU's and that becomes the 100% high mark. Since Prime95 is only using the first CPU, it can at most only use 50%. If you had multiple *real* processors and had Prime95 running on each one, it would come out to 100%. Hope that helps. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Quantum Mechanic Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 8:13 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: 50% CPU? I have an Intel 4 box from MDG, 1 CPU, 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, L1 8KB, L2 512KB. Prime95 is only getting 50%, with System Idle Process taking 50%. It's currently running an LL test in the 20M range. Any ideas why it's only 50%? -QM = ~~ Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/ __ ___ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: 50% CPU?
Does your CPU have hyper-threading for sure, and it's enabled in the BIOS? Task Manager will show one graph per CPU... If you only see a single graph, your OS only thinks it has one CPU (counting all virtual and all real CPUs). I also assume you're using WinNT/Win2k/WinXP since Win98/ME doesn't support multiple CPU's (and doesn't really have Task Manager either...just that system resources thing). Check your list of running processes and see how many Prime95's show up. Should just be 1. If you have 2 running, yeah, running 2 processes on a single CPU, even with the multi-threading, will generally hamper how well either one runs. I once toyed with the idea of running LL tests on the real CPU and running factoring tests on the virtual one, but I never could decide if that was helping out at all...My gut tells me no just because of the memory accesses and not using the single L1/L2 caches on the CPU as well as they could be. By the way, that's a sight to behold when you have a quad CPU P4 system... 8 graphs happily bouncing away. I'm sure on an 8 CPU system it must be terribly impressive to have 16 graphs showing up, but I've yet to get my hands on such a system. :) I have a Pentium 4 processsor and TM indicates an average usage of close to 100% CPU for Prime 95 - am I running 'multiple instances' without being aware of it? If so, how do I prevent this if it will degrade efficiency? _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: 50% CPU?
Not all P4's have hyper threading not all motherboards support it on top of that. So it requires a HT enabled CPU, HT enabled Motherboard, HT supported OS for HT to function. Hmm... Yeah, I thought about that but I guess I just assumed he knew he had a hyper-threading CPU. Isn't it just the P4 Xeon's that have that? Obviously not all P4's have 'em. I have a P4 laptop and it doesn't have hyper-threading... Wish it did. The P4 Extreme Edition should be shipping now... Has the 2MB L2 cache and hyperthreading, just like the Xeon's do. http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/processors/pentium4HTXE/index.htm?iid =HPAGE+low_prod_031103 Yeah baby... Me wants one of those. :) PS - Oh... I just checked... I guess regular P4's do have hyperthreading as well, but only in certain models (2.4GHz or faster). My puny laptop is only a 1.7GHz P4. :( No hyperthreading for me. Here's a link to the Intel hyperthreading page: http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/processors/pentium4/index.htm?iid=ipp _htm+p4p _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: 50% CPU?
p4 with 400 or 533Mhz FSB do not support hyperthreading, *EXCEPT* the p4-3.06/533 does. P4 with 800MHz FSB (these are the C versions) do support hyperthreading. P4 Xeons all support HT. Ahh... Good info. does anyone know which of the 0,1,2,3 CPUs are the physical ones? meaning, are 0,1 one cpu and 2,3 the other, or are 0,2 one and 1,3 the other? The standard way to identify is to have all physical CPU's listed first (0,1 in a dual CPU system) followed by the virtual CPU's (2,3) Prime95's INI file lets you set the affinity, so look in the settings of the program to set that to the physical processors. I can only vouch for Win32 and how it numbers the processors, but I seem to recall that Linux numbered them the same way... All physical followed by all virtual. I could be wrong though. I sometimes am. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Howdy
it was a long story. short version is, he was a consultant, working at some biga$$ insurance company as a PC Tech. he pre-loaded Prime95 on the desktop install so it was running on a few 100 machines at said company. he thought he had verbal permissions from the desktop systems manager, but someone in corporate security got freaked by the nonstandard network traffic they invoked, and sic'd the FBI on him for 'hacking', and they hit him with a search warrant, and took *all* his business computers, tapes, CDs, backups, etc. left him unable to complete ongoing consulting contracts, or even file his taxes as his books were on the computers too. US WEST... Yeah, phone companies don't appreciate when their contractors see all those computers and just can't resist (paraphrase of one of my more infamous quotes). It was actually somewhere in the several thousands of machines... The whole reason they got so upset, I think, is that a couple days *before* I'd started running all those, they had some other network problems that was causing their main app to run slow, and when they investigated, they found Prime95 running, so of course they jumped a conclusion or two and blamed Prime95 for the slowdown. Later on of course we (meaning me and some log files) ascertained that the problem began before Prime95 was ever there, and maybe that's something that helped them decide to drop the whole thing eventually. That and the fact that I didn't actually hack anything. They were all machines I'd built the master image for, and they just never changed any of the passwords in the 2 years since those were deployed. In a strange way, those were my babies... We'd unload 100 machines a night during the deployment... Unbox 'em, put them on desks replacing old dumb terminals... During the deployment of those, we'd sometimes need to send out hotfixes to machines we'd already done, so I wrote some scripts to update them all in the field. Basically I just did one final hotfix to install that oh-so-critical program, prime95. :-P Bad judgment, yeah. Criminal? I never thought so. So, word of the wise to anyone installing this without permission: Don't! It did suck not having all my documents and what not... I tried a couple times to get backups of all my important docs but even though there are federal guidelines that allow for that, I had no luck. Probably the part that stunk the most was paying TCI $400 to replace my rented cable-modem. Well, I did get a signed document from TCI that when I returned the cable modem I'd get my money back... Think I could still cash that in? :) Sure it's gone from TCI to ATT to Comcast, but hey, maybe... Shows how much the price of cable modems has dropped. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Howdy
As someone who's been around since mid-1996, howdy back. Yeah, I was also trying to remember how long it's been around... I guess I really did catch it near the start. I still have those fond memories of emailing George with the exponents I'd randomly selected from the database. Those were the days. Speaking of old old versions... Guess who *finally* got his computer equipment back from the EffBeeEye? Yuppers... Nearly 5 years later and I'm now the proud re-owner of some vintage 1998 equipment. Well, the DLT 35/70 drive is still useful... Glad I got that back. Fired up my main machine (after re-hooking up just about EVERY cable inside and removing the Evidence tape all over everything)... And there it was, my Prime95 16.(4?) running. Too bad the exponent has LOOONG since been first/second time checked... In the 5M range. Hey, it was a pretty new first-time check at the time. :) I was tempted to pull a Mitnick and try to auction off my loose hard drives, each bagged and tagged Evidence, FBI - Washington DC, but I'm just too curious to see what exactly I had on those drives... Been so long, I've forgotten. Plus I'm not really thinking people would pay for crap like that. :-D Maybe I should at least take pictures to remember the moment... Each hard drive, even each floppy and tape they took, each CD etc. has a hand-written serial # sticker affixed to it now. They are organized, even if they didn't know how to hook everything back up inside the computer (fans hanging loose, SCSI drives plugged into the wrong ports, etc). -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 8:41 PM To: Mersenne discussion list Subject: Re: Mersenne: Howdy Just joined the list and wanted to say hey. I am new to the project and find it very interesting. Does anyone know how long it has been running? since at least 1995. my bad, apparently the original prime95 came out in january 1996 this per the FAQ's and stuff on the mersenne.org site. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: M#40 - what went wrong?
On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 03:16:24PM -0400, George Woltman wrote: 2) This case results from the way my C compiler treats floating point NaN. NaN stands for not a number. If NaN is converted to an integer, the integer is zero. So if the FFT data is all NaNs, prime95 will report a prime. I expect this is a FAQ and apologize in advance, but in the age of SSE2 integer instructions why is it still necessary to use floating point calculations? _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: p4 xeons...
You might consider leaving hyperthreading enabled and just run 2 instances on each physical processor. On my dual 2.8 GB P4 Xeon (running Win2K), I found that the virtual CPU's were able to run a lot of the ordinary OS tasks, leaving the physical ones with even more time to do FPU crunching. And yeah, boy oh boy they could burn through an exponent quickly! I wish I had a room full of 'em. :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 5:08 PM To: Mersenne discussion list Subject: Mersenne: p4 xeons... oh boy, maybe I can climb back up the ranks a bit having long since slipped off the first 100... I just brought online a pair of identical Intel servers, each a 2GB dual p4/xeon 2.8Ghz linux 2.4.18 system... running latest non-beta mprime from the downloads page ... I have disabled hyperthreading on these two servers, so they each look like 2 CPUs rather than 4. Looks like each CPU thinks it can complete a 18,600,000 sized assignment in 10 days. one minor mprime question... the readme implied that if I specified `mprime -b2` it would spawn two copies, but it only seemed to spawn one... I had to run `mprime -b` and `mprime -b2` to get both CPUs 100% busy (after manually setting up primenet by using `mprime -m` and `mprime -m -a1` ... another minor question... Is there any way to force CPU affinity, or does mprime do that automatically? _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Poaching -- Definition (was: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1038)
If memory serves me correct, I was the first one to use the term poaching in reference to snagging numbers assigned to someone else, so I'll add my $0.02 worth. :) At the time (and this debate still comes up every now and then), Primenet didn't expire exponents... That was something that George and Scott would do manually on a periodic basis. I thought nothing at all of going through the primenet work lists and finding exponents that hadn't been checked on in a while or had been running for years, or that still had years left to run, and then just completing them myself in order to get the darn things cleared off. The reasoning behind it was (and still is) to clear out old exponents being double-checked so that we would be able to confirm the order of the known Mersenne primes... Having to wait for 2 years (and yes, there were some like that) for a single exponent to be double-checked when that would hold up proving the ordering of a certain prime, well... It bugged me. :) Now that exponents are re-released automatically after not being checked in for 60 days, that has certainly helped. There are still the odd machines (486's or what?) out there that run and actually do check in from time to time, yet will take years to complete a single LL test, but the issue of finishing out double-check ranges hasn't really come up in a while, so I don't care so much at the moment. However, it should be noted that I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to poach a double-check from a MUCH slower machine if that's what was holding up finishing off a range of checks... By slow, I mean an exponent that was still showing over 6 months or so to complete, especially when a good, new machine could finish the same exponent in a couple of days. :) For the most part though, it seemed that once upon a time there was a problem with poachers who just took small exponents from people who were actually still working on them, and simply ran them on a faster machine or something. That's the sort of thing that gives us respectable poachers a bad name. :-D As for any legal issues, well, at the time there were no rewards for finding the next prime, so if I had happened to poach a prime #, I'm sure it wouldn't have been a big a deal as it would be now if you were actually going to claim some prize money as a result. Still though, IANAL but it would seem that since these numbers are public domain, and nobody can be said to have any special claim to any of them, you probably wouldn't have much legal standing if you wanted to go after someone who poached a number from you that turned out to be a prize winning prime. Yeah, it'd suck, but you know the old saying... Life isn't fair. :) Aaron PS - I can't remember how long I've been doing GIMPS now... Since before Primenet, but I can't recall how long ago that was... '96 maybe? '97? Seems like ages at any rate. I just recall sending emails to George telling him which numbers I'd picked from the database to start working on. :) The original primenet. :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Kel Utendorf Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 12:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Poaching -- Definition (was: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1038) On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Richard Woods wrote: Paul Missman wrote: I know that this might be earth shattering news for you, but there is no such thing as poaching. I think that folks who've been following the poaching discussion from the beginning know that there is indeed such a thing, and what it is. But let me post a refresher for the sake of newcomers. You know, the anti-poachers seem so strident and self-absorbed and hell-bent on their mission to make poaching into the next offense that the U.N. investigates that I'm inclined to begin doing some poaching just to tweak them a bit. I wonder what numbers this Woods fellow has reserved...;-) Kel A GIMPS participant since George had only 300 of us running his fine program(s) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Factoring Top 100
Well, you could be goofy like me and try to get to the same # ranking in both the factoring and LL test stats. For a while I was #15 on both, but I think my factoring slipped to #16 and my LL moved to #14... Better add another factoring machine. :) The fun part is you don't even need to have a bunch of machines... Just shoot for being like #98 on both lists or something, adjust your work accordingly to get it just right. :) I suppose it's easier as you reach higher on the stats because we're more spread out there, but the jostling for the #15 position in the factoring table does seem pretty close, relatively speaking... Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Russel Brooks Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 4:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Factoring Top 100 Well I've recently reached my 2nd GIMPS goal of getting into the top 100 factoring. Last summer I made it to the top 1000 LL testers and then switched from double checks to factoring to make my mark there. Now what to try for? :-) Cheers... Russ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: P4 Hyperthreading
I do notice that on my dual P4 Xeon machine, two instances of P95 are running like a champ. Normally on my other dual CPU systems, the rolling average will slip from the normal 1000 to around 900 or so. But on the dual Xeon with both physical CPU's running, the rolling average has only slipped to about 990 or so. This is on a Proliant ML530 mind you, so the memory subsystems and all that are, IMO, better than any other multiprocessor X86 machine. :) The neat thing is that because of my two phantom cpu's running, each P95 instance doesn't really have to give up as much CPU time when there's other stuff going on. For instance, I'm running MSSQL on the same machine and it makes use of the 2 real CPU's and the 2 phantom ones, so P95 doesn't have to give up as much CPU time apparently. On a single CPU system, you would probably see the same benefits, where P95 simply runs better because the phantom CPU is there to take up some of the normal user type things... Windows kernel stuff and other simple integer processes. YMMV, but I'm pretty pleased with what I see. As for running multiple P95 instances on a single physical CPU, forget about it. :) But running one copy, you might just get better performance out of your system this way. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of David Underbakke Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 3:28 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Terry S. Arnold Subject: Re: Mersenne: P4 Hyperthreading At 03:04 PM 1/5/2003 -0800, Terry S. Arnol wrote: Does Hyperthreading have any significant performance impact on Prime95? This issue was discussed on this list around March of 2002. I believe the results were that Prime95 is so efficient that hyperthreading has no performance improvement or benefit for a computer running Prime95. Prime95 has no pipeline stalls that a second hyperthread could efficiently utilize. ___ David Underbakke __ ___ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: P-1 and non k-smooth factors
Do not add the /3GB switch if you are running Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft Small Business Server 2000, or Microsoft BackOffice Server 2000. This switch is designed for use only with Windows 2000 Advanced Server and above. (from the MS knowledge base). Same applies to NT 4, where it only works with the Enterprise edition. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Gareth Randall Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 2:25 PM To: Paul Leyland Cc: Brian J. Beesley; Daran; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: P-1 and non k-smooth factors Isn't this (3GB user mode) only supported on Windows NT Advanced Server? (which is probably free for you to use but for everyone else costs the same as a new car!) If it isn't then I've encountered some people who will wish they'd have known about this a long time ago :-) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: christmas computer system?
Personally, I just ordered a brand spankin' new Compaq server (ugh... HP server now) with dual P4 Xeon 2.8 GHZ processors, 3GB of RAM. I can't wait to get my hot little hands on that and see just how well it crunches the #'s. It's memory is 200MHz DDR (FSB is 400MHz), advanced ECC (Compaq's version of ECC... Detect 4 bit and corrects 2 bit errors, as opposed to detect 2, correct 1 with normal ECC). Anyone on here had any hands on experience with the 2.8 GHz Xeon's yet? Have they been benchmarked? Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Drifting UP(!) in Top Producers ranking?
I'm pretty sure 'twas always thus. I mean, even if you don't find a factor, you're still doing work and contributing to the cause. When I had my little incident a few years back (4 and a half years ago, can you believe it?), the prime service was stopped before a single one had finished it's LL test, but, it did get quite a bit of factoring done, and even though it didn't find a big bunch of factors, my factoring credit did go up a wee bit. Not much... Most of the #'s had already been factored at that time, and this was well before the days of P-1 (I think we were still doing first time tests in the 4M exponent range). From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Russel Brooks You get credit for your work doing factoring even if you're not finding factors. Has this changed? When I joined GIMPS a couple of years ago I though Factoring only counted when a factor was found. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: SV: Mersenne: Drifting UP(!) in Top Producers ranking?
When George originally created the list of candidate exponents, he eliminated tens of millions of composite exponents, and an infinite number of negative exponents, non-integer exponents, imaginary exponents, and prime exponents above the range of the program. Should he get credit for all of these, especially given that it probably took him an afternoon of programming and computation combined, tops, to create the list? By your reasoning he should, since he removed the need for LL testing all those exponents... Ahh, but none of those numbers would have been Mersenne numbers anyway by definition. :) The real work was probably just chugging through the first 53 or 54 bits of factoring. Relatively easy on the old CPU, and probably eliminated quite a bit right off the bat with a minimum of effort. I know it makes no difference to the project if a 53 bit factor is found, or a 65 bit factor. It may have taken longer to find the 65 bit one, but each still saved an entire LL test, so... On the one hand, the person doing the factoring might want to get more credit for factoring the larger #, because it took more CPU time to find. :) At any rate, figuring out how much points to award for doing trial factoring, and then if you even find a factor... You probably just gotta balance that in a way to encourage just the right amount of factoring work. :) Once the server (and client) are ready to assign P-1 work, this will probably all change a bit more to encourage some P-1 factoring work ahead of the LL tests. And maybe assigning 64 bit factoring, then P-1, and then 65 (and higher) bit factoring... In that order. (that was the optimum way to do it, right?) :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Uses for large primes (Was: dissed again)
I guess I'm much more straightforward in my thinking... why not? :) We have all those unused cpu cycles, just itching for something to do besides run NOP loops... why not put that wasted electricity to use. I don't believe in ET's, and while some of the projects like the protein folding are interesting, they should at least get paid for using their computers to do research work like that since somewhere, sometime, someone's gonna make money out of whatever they come up with from that. :) Cracking cryptography is interesting, but the way they went about those projects, just throwing massive horsepower at a factoring problem, by trying every possible key combination... it certainly lacked finesse. It got the job done, but didn't really prove anything useful that we didn't already know (throw enough horsepower at cracking encryption and you can do it eventually... gee... who would have guessed that?) Something about the pure theory behind Mersenne primes has a certain sex appeal. The number itself is of little use, besides as a curiosity perhaps, just like knowing the billionth digit of pi. Then again, maybe we'll learn something about prime number distributions, Mersennes in particular, but you won't know until you find more of them to be able to make predictions to be able to formulate some formulas... :) Just never know... The algorithms used to test for primality have been advanced quite a bit, and it's a good thing that Mssrs. Lucas and Lehmer didn't just throw up their hands and say well, it's of little practical use to find mersenne primes, so why bother. The LL algorithm is pretty neat, and I can only imagine that it has some practical applications elsewhere, besides looking for big prime numbers. Maybe not, what do I know, I'm just a sys admin with a mild fascination with math. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid-reply-address;base.com] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 10:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Uses for large primes (Was: dissed again) Del Brand [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I always get asked what is the purpose or use for such large prime numbers. Since I'm not a math geek, I don't know what to tell them. Well, the prime numbers GIMPS has discovered are so overwhelmingly large as to make them completely impractical for (present-day) cryptographic purposes that the old saw about more secure cryptography doesn't hold water. I always tell people that it's not the numbers themselves that are of practical importance - rather, it's the algorithms that are developed to manipulate them efficiently that are important. For example, efficient large-integer arithmetic is important both in basic number-theoretic research and in applications such as cryptography. Fast transform arithmetic (which we use to perform the large-integer multiplies that are the rate-limiting operation in most primality-testing algorithms) has a huge range of applicability, from the signal processing that goes on every time one makes a call on a mobile phone to analysis of scientific data. Being able to squeeze a factor of 2-5x in speed out of one's CPU (the typical speed ratio of the GIMPS' clients' FFTs versus various industry standard FFTs like that in Numerical Recipes or the like) via a well-crafted hardware implementation of the algorithm is also a useful thing. Personally, I need no immediate practical justification - I just find working at the interface between number theory and computer science to be endlessly fascinating - but for those who do, there is no lack of such. Cheers, -Ernst _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Dissed again
We could set a contest, where people should give answers in the spirit of this answer by Spike, to the question: What is the use of large primes? My entry: To piss off phone companies. :-D Do I win? _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Dissed again
Yeah, well, we don't have a super cool Trojan horse program that can update itself (and crash machines) like these other ones, and we're not out there looking for ET or saving cancer boy or anything... just a bunch of geeks looking for big numbers. :) (tongue planted firmly in cheek here). Actually I don't really know... do the folding@home and seti@home projects use self-updating code? When they phone home, can they update themselves like spyware (thinking about Hotbar and the like)? To be honest, I thought that would be a neat option (note the use of the word option) to have your Prime95 check itself with something on the primenet server that shows the latest version... if there's a newer version available, a little box with a clickable link to the ftp site to download the new version. But certainly not automatic (or if there was an auto-update, have that NOT be the default), and also have a setting to turn that off entirely (for people who run it on unattended machines like servers, etc). Pretty much like the way the new Windows Update works... has full auto mode, download and prompt to install, notify only, or totally turned off. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of E. Weddington Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 8:09 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Dissed again Folding@Home's success: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/10/021022070813.htm Again, they mention SETI@home. As if that were the only other distributed project out there. *sigh* Eric Weddington _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: On v18 factoring
I'm embarrassed to admit that I have the same situation. Given my past, I'm concerned about this... Suffice to say that the machine I used to use when working at a *totally different* telecom (not US WEST, oddly) had Prime95 running happily on it. When I left, I didn't get a chance to wipe the machine, so every once in a blue moon I see it check in a result. My mistake, for assuming this company wiped and reloaded machines that were reassigned to someone. It's a lowly Pentium 180, but I had checked it to do LL tests regardless of server preference. Meaning that nowadays, it's taking nearly a year to complete one. I haven't actually seen it in a while, maybe 6 months or more, so maybe they finally retired it (a P180 running NT4 with about 128MB of RAM). It was just odd... 2-3 years after I last saw that machine, and then to see it report in every 6 months or so. The odd part was, the machine must not get used all that much because I thought I had it set to check in every week or so, but it was months between check-ins. In that time, the exponent would expire, but then the machine would come up and start working on it again... meaning someone else had probably got the assignment and may have even finished it for all I know. Very peculiar. I guess I should count my blessings that it's been absent for a long while now, lest the FBI accuse me of hacking in and breaking another telecom's network. :) I think I shared the story about how even for the next year, every now and then a US WEST machine was reporting a result. I just hope that US WEST was checking that status page and used the reports to find the machine still running it and wipe it. Fortunately, last activity on that (just re-checked, to make sure... hehe) was Jul. 31, 1999. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Gordon Bower Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 12:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: On v18 factoring An odd thing happened to me a little while back. The machine which I used at a previous job, up to April 1999, started doing trail-factoring again a couple months ago! It's nice to see it working, and apparently not bothering its new owner by working -- but the machine is now out of my control, indeed I don't even know where the machine IS now. It is running version 18, which was, of course, the latest version out at the time the machine was last under my control. It's beginning to experience difficult getting assignments below the the 20.x-million limit. Most of the time everything is fine .. but over the weekend it tied up some 100 exponents in the 20.7-20.9 range, then immediately abandoned them. (It is set to report every day, and reported progress on lower exponents, and, mysteriously, on two higher exponents, yesterday, but has not checked in a report on the other 100 or so exponents since checking them out.) I manually released the abandoned exponents today. This time. But I'd rather not have to do this on a daily basis -- and would rather not cause a meltdown when the server finally runs out of assignments within v18's range altogether. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to stop a runaway copy of v18? Perhaps in a few weeks the server can be updated to return an out of exponents error to v18 instead of offering it an assignment it can't handle? GRB _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else...
I recall a problem of some sort recently with older versions of the client snagging 20K exponents for factoring even though they aren't capable of factoring ones that big... Perhaps in fixing that bugaboo, some exponents were re-released that shouldn't have been? What version of the prime software are you using? Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Barry Stokes Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 2:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else... When I was checking my individual account page thing, I noticed that several of the numbers I was supposed to be factoring didn't appear in my list. I then checked the Hourly World Test Status, Assignments Report file, and found that the numbers I had have now been assigned to other people. I have not released these numbers back, and the program is still working on them (they are still in the worktodo.ini file). Also, one of the exponents I got assigned doesn't seem to appear in the list at all... Anyone got any ideas as to why this is happening? Here's my worktodo.ini: Factor=20563583,59 Factor=20563637,59 Factor=20563651,59 Factor=20563657,59 Factor=20563663,59 Factor=20563687,59* Factor=19287997,64 Factor=20588999,59* And the corresponding entries in status.txt: 19287997 F 64 1.8 10.0 60.0 03-Oct-02 09:28 02-Oct-02 15:01 TwistedFateBarry2 20563583 F 59 0.0 3.0 61.0 04-Oct-02 08:47 griphagen C_adm22_0510 20563637 F 59 0.0 15.0 75.0 04-Oct-02 08:48 ka9dgx LM11_02 20563651 F 59 0.0 4.0 61.0 04-Oct-02 08:48 griphagen C_adm22_0560 20563657 F 59 0.0 6.0 66.0 04-Oct-02 08:57 FreeTibet CPQI1 20563663 F 59 0.0 12.0 72.0 04-Oct-02 08:59 mael1 Plato As you can see, I still have one of the numbers I was assigned, but 5 have been given to someone else, and 2 (marked with *) don't appear in the lists anywhere. P.S. I only checked these numbers out within the last few days, and so it's not that they've expired... -- Barry Stokes Luck can't last a lifetime, unless you die young. -- Russell Banks _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else...
Oops... mistakes happen though. :) Out of my 16 factoring exponents above 20,500,000, I only found 2 that had been reassigned. And they weren't the current exponents anyway... I just forced those machines to check-in and it released them and grabbed new ones just fine. Most of my machines are set to check in every 4 days anyway, so it wouldn't have been too big of a deal. I would suggest to anyone else that they should make all their factoring clients check in right now to clear out any such exponents that got moved around. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of George Woltman Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:15 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else... At 10:44 AM 10/4/2002 +0100, Barry Stokes wrote: When I was checking my individual account page thing, I noticed that several of the numbers I was supposed to be factoring didn't appear in my list. I then checked the Hourly World Test Status, Assignments Report file, and found that the numbers I had have now been assigned to other people... Anyone got any ideas as to why this is happening? Oops, I blew it. I mentioned a few days ago that we are having trouble with version 18 factoring clients grabbing exponents and not processing them. Scott is working on a server fix. In the meantime, I've been locating these exponents and putting them back in the pool. Last night, I erred and freed up the wrong set of exponents (I reran a macro that was a few days old rather than running the new macro). There is no way for me to undo the damage I have done. Sorry. To avoid duplicate work, check your worktodo.ini file for assignments above 20,540,000. Then look at your individual account report. If the exponent appears in your worktodo.ini file and not in your individual account report, then delete it from your worktodo.ini file. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Reference Machine
I'll have to go along with other comments, that using some ancient CPU seems odd, but then again, any baseline you use will end up being arbitrary anyway, so... whatever works. As for prime95, I think that was more a reference to Windows 95, and there was the service version, priment (or ntprime). Now that George is moving towards a unified version for either OS, something like winprime perhaps? Microsoft stopped using year #'s in their OS', to which other software companies that *had* adopted that practice are now also stopping, moving to plain version #'s or something else entirely. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Frank_A_L_I_N_Y Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 4:39 PM To: Mersenne discussion list Subject: Mersenne: Reference Machine Anyone consider using a Cray as our benchmark? Also Anyone considering renaming prime95 considering it is 2002? Thanks Frank. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: dual-P4 xeon/win2k/prime95 / Re: Mersenne: GIMPS forums!
at work lately i've been trying to set up a dual-P4 win2k system with prime95. but when it boots only one of the prime95 starts up when i log in. both are set for start at bootup each with cpu-affinity hard-coded. I'm guessing you've installed prime95 twice in two different directories. If so, what is happening is both are trying to use the service name Prime95 Service and overwriting each other. Try turning off Start at Bootup on both. Edit one of the local.ini files and add ServiceName=Prime95 Service #2. Turn on Start at bootup on both. If you run the second prime95 from the same directory with the -A1 command line argument, then you shouldn't have this trouble. However, if you don't have admin access on the Win2K system, it won't be able to write to the registry locations to autostart it at bootup. Your best bet then is just put it in your startup group and NOT check start at bootup. Of course then it only runs when you're logged on... Just one of those things... WinNT/2K is designed that way, with security in mind, so along with that come limitations to what non-admins can do, and installing services or modifying some registry locations are part of it. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Double Checking Errors (and Prime95 NT service issues)
I think looking at that file would at least provide interesting to the curious among us. I say go for it :) Aaron PS - Regarding the running Prime95 as an NT service... I concur that if you run it on your own machine, it's obviously not a security risk since I'd hope that you're already a local admin on your own NT/win2k/winxp box. For more protected machines, any vulnerability would still require the ability to logon locally, and that's something that any good server should already address. The major flaw only seems to be workstations where maybe you don't allow the normal user to have local admin access, and I know some companies set it up that way. And in that case, WITH PROPER PERMISSION (had to say that), it would make more sense to run it without the icon visible anyway so the user isn't distracted or can change things. All in all, what I'm saying is, it seems to be a moot point in 99.% of the cases I can imagine. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of George Woltman Sent: Saturday, August 10, 2002 11:25 AM To: Gary Edstrom; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Double Checking Errors At 07:28 PM 8/9/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote: That brings to mind another question. I was wondering what you do when you detect an error during double checking. Do you notify the person that sent in the erroneous result so that he can check out his computer further? No, for several reasons. 1) We don't know your double-check is wrong until a triple (or even quadruple) check is run. Thus, it could be a few months before we'd email you. 2) If a first time check is bad, it will be two or three years before the double check and triple check come in to confirm this. 3) It would be a fair amount of work for me. Right now the server does not verify double-checks. That is done by me, with the aid of a program, at home. Matching bad results with email addresses, sending the email, and wading through bounced emails is not something I would relish! Is there interest in adding a new file to ones you can download at the bottom of http://www.mersenne.org/status.htm? It could contain all the confirmed bad results (I have kept this data). This would make it easier for you folks to check and see if you have any problem computers. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems
Speaking of problems, I had problems getting the Prime95 working as an NT service on a dual-processor machine. I suppose it's probably documented somewhere, but it seems that Prime95 ignores any service name settings in the existing NTPrime local.ini file... So I'm still using NTPrime on my dual CPU machines... Any chance of getting prime95 to honor the service name settings in the local.ini file just like ntprime did? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jean-Yves Canart Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 9:38 AM To: George Woltman Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems Hi George, I have tested this new feature (using W2K + prime95 V22.7) I have found that when logging off and logging on again, the small red icon is not coming back (while prime95 is still running) Regards, Jean-Yves - Original Message - From: George Woltman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 20:55 Subject: Re: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems Hi, At 09:22 AM 7/25/2002 +0200, Helmut Zeisel wrote: I recently upgraded from WinNT to W2K and now want to install the service version of mprime again. Since I previously used ntprime, I tried ntprime -install. This worked, but starting the service exits with Could not start the Prime Service service on Local Computer. Error 5: Access is denied. I have administrator rights, so this should not be the cause. Anyway, I downloaded FireDaemon-Light-1_5-BRC1.exe and installed Prime95. Starting FiredDaemonService: prime95 now exits with Could not start the FireDaemon Service: prime 95 service on Local Computer. Error 1: Incorrect function. Any hints what went wrong? Not really. Please try ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v227.zip The GUI version can now be installed as an NT service. Just check the Start at Bootup menu option. This is a new feature so let me know of any problems. Thanks, George __ ___ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers __ ___ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems
Well sure, I mean you could, in theory, take the gui part of prime95 and make it a standalone thing, perhaps getting the vitals using snmp or wmi or some other such thing. The service part though, especially for multi-cpu, does need to be paid attention to in the code itself, allowing multiple instances to run, with certain cpu affinities being set, etc. Since most of those functions for the practical operation are in place, I doubt George has *that* much extra work (although it is tricky, and we all appreciate it). It would be cool to have the stats available via some other method, so other front-ends, as you say, could read that info and display it in some creative way. Nothing like the SETI screen saver, although hey, why not, if someone wanted to. Yeah, screen savers reduce how much cpu time is available for calculations, but if it gets someone to run Prime95 that wouldn't have before, *some* cpu time is better than none at least. -Original Message- From: Gareth Randall [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 3:59 PM To: George Woltman; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Aaron Subject: Re: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems Hi, I'm no expert on windows programming, but take a generally downbeat view of the amount of ongoing time and effort required to code for the proprietary API of the week that seems to characterise this OS. Consequently, is it possible for someone to code a service wrapper that spawns the prime service as an additional process? In other words, separate out the service management and icon code into a separate process, which can be developed by a larger public group, rather than have all this code in prime.exe itself with the corresponding requirement that the coding effort all fall on the shoulders of one person. This would allow outside parties to develop the most fancy and functional frontends, and be able to do all the compilation steps themselves while circumventing the need to have access to the necessarily secret encryption algorithm that protects the authenticity of results. Can this be done? Surely this one's a runner? Yours, Gareth _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Old 486 retired...
If I ever get my machines back from the FBI, I'll donate them to a Mersenne hall of fame. Or would that be better off in a hall of infamy? :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Gareth Randall Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2002 1:20 AM To: Johan Winge Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Old 486 retired... An impressive record! Probably worth taking a photo of it. Well, the world's first web server, a NeXT computer, is in a display cabinet in a restaurant in CERN. Maybe one day there'll be a hall of fame (online even) for veteran GIMPS systems :-) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Prime95 as an NT/2000/XP service
Here's my reply to George... figure I might as well share my thoughts with the rest of y'all and see what ya think. -- As with any executable that may run as a system service, it would be nice to have some installation routine check to see if it's on an NTFS partition, and if so, make sure that wherever the EXE file ends up, it's read/write for only administrators, read-only for everyone else. Otherwise, someone with a non-admin logon account on that machine could modify the EXE with their own, reboot, and that EXE of theirs runs under local system and can do naughty things. That's why, in general, most software that runs as a service will copy it's files into the system32 directory where, by default, the permissions are just as described. If it's a FAT partition, then it really doesn't matter because any service could be modified. For that matter, you could modify a file on an NTFS partition by using any of the NTFS read/write programs like NTFSDOS or ERD Commander, etc. etc. But the point is not to make it easy on someone. If they had a tool like NTFSDOS or ERD Commander, they could do whatever they wanted anyway. :) Otherwise, as long as the code is working to prevent launching multiple instances, then I don't see a problem with it overall. You could even have the service run as a user account instead of local system, although that allows for other possible problems if network access is restricted by user account according to policies or single sign on firewall solutions. I'd guess that in those cases, even local system would have problems, so it may be worth looking into... create a local, non-admin user account and have the service run as that user. Common practice, especially for web services, .NET stuff, etc. My $0.02 worth. Aaron PS - In re: to the comments below... Guest is disabled by default, so that's probably the least of the concerns. :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jeff Woods Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 8:28 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Prime95 as an NT/2000/XP service At 12:46 AM 6/26/02 -0400, you wrote: I've spent a few days fighting with Windows and MFC to make Prime95 run as a true Windows NT Service. That is, when you check the Start at Bootup menu choice, prime95 is installed as a service. At next bootup it starts before anyone logs in. At first login, the familiar red icon appears in the system tray, and prime95 keeps running even when you log off. This question is for the serious NT sysadmins out there: Given that Microsoft strongly discourages NT services having a GUI interface, are there any problems or security issues I need to worry about? A GUI service must run under the Local System account. You can still use Hide Icon to make the service virtually invisible to all users. Let's say Joe User is logged on as Joe, with Guest permissions. Do you REALLY want him to have access to a GUI that is running as LocalSystem (in essence, as Administrator)? No, you don't. While your app MAY be secure, most admins won't want to give that kind of break to someone trying to hack the box, and any serious admin is simply going to download the True Service version, and run that. Even if there are problems, I think this will work well for naive home users running WinXP with multiple user accounts. My hope is to eliminate the NTsetup and NTPrime programs with this feature. Yes, with WinXP, it might offer an advantage. But you asked for the view from a serious NT admin, and I don't want to see the separate version go away, not if it means having to run a LocalUser app, and giving access to it to Guest users _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Assignment balancing (was: Re: Mersenne: Re: Trial Factoring: Back to the math)
Another thing people might want to consider... If you have a dual processor box, have one of the prime threads doing factoring while the other does LL tests. I've been meaning to do that for a while now, and I guess I might get around to that next week. I think most of the machines I have testing are dual processor, so that should increase my factoring output at least. :) I've also got my slower machines (under 500MHz or so) already doing factoring... goes back to something I've always said: pick the right assignments for the right machines. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 2:55 PM To: Russel Brooks Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Assignment balancing (was: Re: Mersenne: Re: Trial Factoring: Back to the math) On 17 Feb 2002, at 17:54, Russel Brooks wrote: Am I interpreting this thread correctly? That more factoring is needed? My climb up the LL top producers is starting to stall so maybe it's time to switch to factoring. I'm quite sure there's no need to panic! So far as I'm concerned, I've been underdoing factoring - less than 5% of my contribution. Theoretically the best balance for the project as a whole is about 10% of the CPU effort in trial factoring. The other point here is that we have had two major improvements in the efficiency of the LL testing algorithm since the last time trial factoring was seriously looked at, so some theoretical work on trial factoring is probably due. Why not try some factoring assignments, if _you_ think it will be fun for a change? You can always change back when you get bored... _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Re: Are problems more likely in the last 1% of a 10,gigadigit LL?
FWIW bzip2 does a significantly better job of compressing save files than zip, but at the expense of using several times as many CPU cycles. I'm doing a QA run on exponent 67108763 keeping interim files at million iteration intervals, so, by the time I finish, I will have 67 save files. The raw size is 14MB per file, but bzip2 reduces them to around 9MB. Whether we should be unduly worried about a job which takes ~ 1 year to run producing ~ 1GB of data, in these days when it's hard to buy new HDDs smaller than 20GB, is a matter of opinion. In my tests, I was able to get about 50% compression using RAR, but it does take more cycles. I suppose if anyone is really that concerned about saving disk space, they could compress it themselves... like I said, I doubted George would want to implement something like that anyway. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Re: Are problems more likely in the last 1% of a 10,gigadigit LL?
My home office has among other things a Compaq RAID array of 5 36GB drives and a few 18GB/9GB as well. MAN OH MAN that thing gets loud! If it weren't for all the other machines and the fan that blows straight on all of them, those drives would drive me nuts. As it is, everything else combined managed to be even louder. :) How well do the save files compress? Probably not much, being psuedo-random binary, but maybe a bit... in which case if you had an NTFS partition you could make your Prime directory compressed, or periodically zip up your old save files. Just a thought. Hey, I just tried and they do compress sort of okay... 71% of original size just using default zip settings. Using max compression doesn't improve anymore than the default. Curiously, using zip -1 (lowest compression) results in the smallest file by a few ten thousand bytes... due to smaller library I'm sure. I doubt George would be interested in working in a little simple zip routine when saving/reading save files? It might slow it down too much for some folks (although honestly, it takes a fraction of a second to zip using the lowest compression level), but maybe a nice option for those looking to save a bit of space when testing large exponents. Especially if you save interim files or have 2 saved files... the space savings would add up quickly. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Steinar H. Gunderson Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 3:19 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Re: Are problems more likely in the last 1% of a 10,gigadigit LL? On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 10:55:00PM +, Russel Brooks wrote: My save files are @1.5M in size. I could save quite a few before space was any concern (too me). Mine are @7M -- and I'm of those who prefer speed and sound level (two Ultra160 SCSI 1rpm 18.2GB disks, in RAID-1, both very quiet) over diskspace -- people are buying _cheap_ 80-100GB disks without even blinking nowadays. /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Missing assignement
Looks like someone finished it: 14421269 66 0x6E664B5F86CB66__12-Feb-02 08:04 Team_Prime_Rib DSheets_50 PS - I'm just thrilled because I found a factor of an exponent that beat my previous record... 101 bit factor. I'm too lazy to look through the cleared exponents list, so does anyone know what the largest factor is that has been found by GIMPS lately? Of course there may be smaller factors for the same exponent, but I'm still impressed at finding such a huge factor to an even much huger number. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Ignacio Larrosa Cañestro Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:11 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Missing assignement In my personal account report of yesterday could be read: *** Individual Account Report 11 Feb 2002 21:57 (Feb 11 2002 2:57PM Pacific) --- Exponents Assigned --- Assignment overdue check-in is set at 60.0 days (0.0 days to expire) prime fact current days exponentbits iteration run / to go / exp date updated date assigned computer ID Mhz Ver -- - - --- --- --- .. 14421269 66 21.2 143.8 66.8 21-Jan-02 16:08 PII350-RDIES 351 v19/v20 .. ** But now this exponent is missing. How is it possible?? Saludos, Ignacio Larrosa Cañestro A Coruña (España) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ #94732648 _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Missing assignement
Answering my own question: (guess I wasn't so lazy after all) 14517229 103 F 9924470843259440116293839391239 10-Jan-02 15:35 00dbm Bertrand -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Aaron Blosser Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:41 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Mersenne: Missing assignement Looks like someone finished it: 14421269 66 0x6E664B5F86CB66__12-Feb-02 08:04 Team_Prime_Rib DSheets_50 PS - I'm just thrilled because I found a factor of an exponent that beat my previous record... 101 bit factor. I'm too lazy to look through the cleared exponents list, so does anyone know what the largest factor is that has been found by GIMPS lately? Of course there may be smaller factors for the same exponent, but I'm still impressed at finding such a huge factor to an even much huger number. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: RE: Factoring top 10
Okay, those are HUGE factors. Have the predictions on the work eliminated by P-1 factoring been pretty much confirmed by the # of large factors found? In other words, is the extra processing time paying off? I'd hazard a guess that the time saving is indeed appreciable, but I wonder if anyone has done some cold hard stats on it. -Original Message- From: George Woltman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 12:33 PM To: Aaron Blosser; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Factoring top 10 Hi, At 11:41 AM 2/12/2002 -0800, Aaron Blosser wrote: PS - I'm just thrilled because I found a factor of an exponent that beat my previous record... 101 bit factor. I'm too lazy to look through the cleared exponents list, so does anyone know what the largest factor is that has been found by GIMPS lately? The top 10 - 39 digits for the biggest! 1433462339 56379662829467477289264041716715663 1318781335 63113922700063643342764849026462401 1075012734 4777866348588447235992766781311399 1293216734 4314676575733979321708362055504719 1050634734 2529967840093210987185485731119337 1345961334 2004522251312746653413939484232703 1454281734 1001733277749555116882783777187313 1234882933 972299186932443166370257195895087 1437882733 749393632720558083108841526201431 1311127132 35439060242916356936579100907769 _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Preventing hacks
Well, After long and hard thought on this (approximately 30 seconds), I have the following suggestion: Each team account (could apply to accounts with just one machine as well) should have 2 passwords. A master password that could be used on the web pages to manage exponents on all team machines, and also a per-machine password (could be automatically generated when a new machine gets an exponent). There's really no reason I can think of why a password would be required to have a machine join a team, is there? I mean, someone could sign their machine up to some team and reserve a bunch of exponents with no intention of working on them, but hey, someone could do that anyway right now by just setting up their own team... So a team account master password could unreserved exponents on any machine, and then the machine password could be used to work with exponents for only that one machine. Well, at any rate, that would keep individual team members from wreaking havoc by this shared password scheme currently in place, while still allowing a team leader to unreserve exponents or do other things from the web page. Just a thought, and again, this is just my 30-second attempt to come up with an idea. I'm sure it can and will be improved upon. Aaron (aka I'm-not-a-hacker-I'm-a-math-geek) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of George Woltman Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 12:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Missing assignement Hi all, At 08:10 PM 2/12/2002 +0100, Ignacio Larrosa Cañestro wrote: In my personal account report of yesterday could be read: Assignment overdue check-in is set at 60.0 days (0.0 days to expire) But now this exponent is missing. How is it possible?? OK, the cat is out of the bag. In late January, one of the more productive teams was hacked. Prime95/Primenet has some security holes. One of these holes is that a team must make its password public for new members to join. Someone exploited this hole. This loser thought it would be cute to unreserve all the team's exponents (a few hundred) via the manual web pages. Brad Scott patched the manual forms and embarked on implementing a more permanent solution. A week ago, they struck again using prime95 itself to again unreserve some of the team's exponents. Unfortunately, rather than hurting the team, the hacker ended up hurting ordinary users. The server reassigned all the unreserved exponents. Since the team's computers had a head start on these exponents they are likely to finish them first. When they report a result, your assignment will disappear from the active assignments list. GIMPS, of course, can use your result for double-checking. Brad/Scott have now changed server so that none of this team's exponents can be unreserved. They are still working on making this feature available to all teams to prevent this in the future. Brad Scott are better able to comment on this, but I think that this is the first hacker attack on the reservation system. There have been many denial of service attacks and attempts at defacing the web pages (don't people have better things to do with their time?) Are there other security holes? Yes. For obvious reasons I don't know if we should discuss these in a mailing list. Beefing up security costs time and money. These are limited resources in an all-volunteer, not-for-profit, zero-revenue project. We'll try to do the best we can given our limitations. Always remember GIMPS is just for fun, George _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
...what should I do in order not to waste my (my A1200) time working on numbers which may be taken over by someone else in some uncertain future? Currently I'm finishing my first exponent (that's M7505207 double-check)... Don't disclose your exponants to a list read by Aaron Blosser. :-) Very funny. :) Hey, I contribute more computer time (with permission nowadays!!) than a lot, so you can all quit your belly-achin'. :) I haven't poached in a long time, probably since the changes to Primenet which made it unnecessary (I don't even recall how long ago that happened), nor do I think anyone else should poach now. Only reason I did it before was because there was no methodology to rehab stale exponents, so I figured someone had to do it. That's all, end of story. PS - Be sure to read everything I say with the proper attitude... I really am trying to smile and be friendly whenever I say anything... I would have guessed my smiley emoticons would have given it away, but I think some folks take me way too seriously... one of the problems of email. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
To be honest, I don't even recall what I may have said in the past regarding poaching of exponents. I think it was me that applied the word to the actual practice of nabbing exponents that were still assigned. :) If I recall correctly, the topic came up at a time when PrimeNet did not expire exponents or require check ins every 60 days. Used to be that if you were assigned an exponent, basically you had it for a very very long time and no check-ins were required. I think Scott may have gone through manually and reallocated exponents that he deemed were abandoned, but I'm not sure of the actual process. All I know is, the only reason I ever poached exponents in the past was when I saw one that had been checked out for over a year and had never been checked in or updated. And yes, there were quite a few of those at the time. It was that previous thread about poaching that led to the changes in Primenet with expirations, requiring checkins every 60 days or your exponent would expire, etc. The way it is now, an exponent that's never been updated will expire in roughly 120 days which isn't bad. Compare that to before those changes when there were exponents out there that hadn't been checked in for 2 years and were still showing 3 or even 4 years to go. If those weren't poached and finished, there would have been significant gaps in the database. And while Scott would have gone through and cleaned such things out eventually, heaven knows he had better things to be doing. I think Mary's objection now is that poaching is not necessary, and she's right. Another objection is that if someone were going to poach exponents, this one person in particular was doing a lousy job at selecting which ones. I suppose that by selecting exponents that were on the verge of expiring, they would be reassigned to someone else in very short order anyway, meaning he would finish them off just days before the new owner finishes them which yeah, is frustrating. Where I part company with yours and others opinion is what to do about it. In my mind, tracking down the guys name and address for whatever reason seems to go beyond what I would consider necessary diligence. I think that in the future, simply mentioning this person's primenet ID to the folks at Entropia should suffice since they could then send an email explaining why it's bad form to nab exponents prior to their expiration. Aaron PS - Mentions of my past on here can get confusing because, besides the poaching threads of the past, there's also another matter from my past which someone else posted a Google thread to (not Mary... I think it was Nathan something-or-other). I'm not at all embarrassed about that incident, but it just bothers me when someone decides to do Google searches in some sort of attempt to find information on someone in particular. That's the sort of thing that borders on stalking, and it wouldn't be the first time someone's done a Google search and then rejoiced that they found such a juicy tidbit of information from my past. :) That's okay, because in so doing they've just proved themselves to be a kook and there's no longer any doubt as to whether I should ignore them. :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Steve Elias Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 5:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Work being wasted Aaron, i really know nothing about your past except what i've read here. it's your current comments re poaching which i have found objectionable. as you can see, i do feel free to comment regardless of your possible lack of appreciation for my comments. if you repented apologized for your alleged-previous-poaching-transgressions i might think differently, but you appear to be unapologetic. (but i don't really expect you to care what *i* think!!!) really - to each his own. i do recognize your right to think that your current pro-poaching comments are moral even if actually they are not, just as i recognize a moral-relativist's right to so delude themselves on whatever matter of immorality they like. while these folks may be deluding themselves they aren't fooling me - and i'm plenty foolish on my own accord! _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
Well, I think that most people on the list know of my past... it's when someone does a Google search on me that I think borders on stalking. One can only wonder what you might find if you did Google searches on everyone on this list. :) Anyway... the gardening analogy doesn't pass muster. First, may I point out that neither GIMPS nor PrimeNet *owns* the Mersenne exponents being tested. I would posit that *anyone* is free to test *any* exponent they choose. Clearly, the purpose of GIMPS/PrimeNet is to optimize this search by assigning exponents in an orderly fashion. I'm not advocating poaching since I feel that Scott/George's system works fine. But I am saying that if someone wants to poach exponents, while I might disagree, there's nothing really wrong with it. Stealing someone's plants is illegal. Nobody owns these exponents so there's nothing to steal. That's my only point. Rude, yes. Morally/ethically/legally there's really no problem with doing it. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
Legally perhaps not (however, they are using PrimeNet in a way that violates the stated terms of usage), morally and ethically I do think (and I suspect most people would think) it is wrong. Not terribly surprising that you don't think it is, I suppose. See, it's the snide comments like that that I don't appreciate. It's attitudes like yours that are more likely to drive people away from GIMPS than whether or not someone poaches an assignment and results in the occasional triple check. Fortunately I happen to know that most people who participate are nice folks. So the fact that a couple people on here want to make continued references to my past in an attempt to paint me as an uncaring and morally reprehensible person isn't enough to dissuade me from continued participation. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
Aw heck, let's just agree to disagree and shake hands. :) I'm not terribly upset, and as I mentioned before, I have far greater things in life to be concerned about than GIMPS, so I didn't mean to make a big deal of it. :) First, I would like to point out that you brought yourself into this discussion. I made no reference to you until you decided to comment. Secondly, I don't think it is at all snide or uncalled for to mention that you have poached in the past when you express your opinion that it is not wrong. Thirdly, why would it bother you to have your past poaching brought up if you don't think it was wrong? _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
Sounds like stalking to me. Just live with it I guess and if the occasional exponent gets triple-checked, I don't anticipate losing too much sleep. Yeah, it sucks, but what lengths should anyone go to to find the guy and say something? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Russel Brooks Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 4:35 PM To: Mary Conner; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Work being wasted Mary Conner wrote: I managed to grab a bunch of those 4.5M doublechecks that George released on Jan 10th. A few days ago, when my machine was about to finish up the second one of the batch I grabbed, the account k5gj submitted a result for this exponent. A little investigation showed that this account does this K5GJ is possibly/probably a Ham call sign. You can find the owner's name and address at arrl.org with a call sign search. It says the call sign is owned by a Thomas Cage of Amarillo Texas. There isn't an email listed but if he's a member of the arrl then he may use their address forwarding in which case you might be able to contact him via [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cheers... Russ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
Nah, I just don't think it's worth tracking down this guy's name, address and who knows what else just because he's poaching exponents in what is, after all, just a hobby. Not sure what the crack about with your history means, but whatever. I can't take this all too seriously because, really, it's just a hobby. :) Like they say, you pick your battles. I guess if someone wanted to make a huge issue out of this, they could, but me, I'd rather spend my time and energy on more productive things. Just my $0.02 worth, and obviously people can and will disagree. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted
I hate it when people dredge up the past. -Original Message- From: Nathan Russell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 8:41 PM To: Aaron Blosser Subject: RE: Mersenne: Work being wasted At 06:12 PM 2/2/2002 -0800, you wrote: Not sure what the crack about with your history means, but whatever. I can't take this all too seriously because, really, it's just a hobby. :) As it is for all of us, of course. However, while I have no idea what Mary is talking about, a quick check on Google reveals there's some stories about you out there well in excess of the actual: http://lists.jammed.com/ISN/1998/09/0067.html Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: slaying cpus with prime95
As for SMART on disks - I've never heard of SMART giving more than 24 hours notice of a failing disk, but I have heard of many cases where disks have died without prior warning even though SMART monitoring has been active. Other people seem to have the same experience. I get the impression that SMART monitoring may be a waste of (a relatively small number of) CPU cycles. I guess experiences will vary. I know that on our Compaq servers, the SMART warnings are wonderful. Just recently I swapped out a drive that was giving off warnings about too many sectors having to be remapped. And in the case of Compaq servers, if you're using all the Insight Manager agents, a drive is covered under warranty *before* it's even failed (that good old pre-failure warranty), so you can swap it out even though technically it's still working okay. I've done that several times on Compaq systems, and I think it's wonderful. But I guess it all depends on the monitoring software in place. All SMART is going to tell you is the # of errors and other drive indicators, and I guess it's up to the software to determine if those errors constitute normal behaviour or if there's something more serious involved. Same goes with the CPU and fan monitoring... those Compaq systems monitor fan rotation, temperatures at multiple points inside the case, etc. There are pre-defined settings for those sensors, so that if the temperature goes above, you can either have the system shut down or keep on running but send an alert (on a server, it's preferable to have it send an alert, otherwise having a system shut down without any notice can be aggravating, but I guess that's a matter of whether or not you have 24/7 human monitoring of alerts, so you can react quickly to those). Granted, Compaq servers with all those features cost a pretty penny. Their desktops offer most of the same things, albeit not as many sensors inside the case. :) I think I've mentioned this before, but it is interesting to see how when I kick off Prime95 on one of those servers, the fans which normally are just idling will kick into high gear. They're variable speed, so they only kick in when needed, and it doesn't take long at all for the CPU's to heat up and trigger the extra fan rpm's. On a lot of the newest Compaq servers, you can put in redundant fans so if one or two fail, you're still covered, and you also get better cooling when all are running. Granted, these things can be QUITE loud (I have 3 on my desk right now and it is annoying, but thank goodness they're just the slim DL360's). The huge cluster boxes or 8-way servers can deafen a person, not to mention the Storageworks boxes with those monstrous vortex fans on the back, pumping who knows how many CFM's and generating quite a few decibels in the process. :) Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: slaying cpus with prime95
I'd wager that in most of those instances, the computer would have died without Prime95's help. Faulty CPU fans in particular... whether they conk out after a short while or eventually, a bad fan is a ticking time bomb. Prime95 may have shortened the life span a bit, but it was doomed. :) Any machine that lacks proper ventilation and allows excess CPU heat to affect the hard drive is buggy design if you ask me. I have a 1GHz IBM laptop that I run Prime95 on 24/7 and while the thing can get hot if I actually place it on my lap, I've had nary a problem except on a couple occasions when I inadvertently blocked the inflow air vent and the thing did overheat. When it did that, it just shut itself down. Things to look for on any computer, Prime95 running or not, are noisy cpu/case fans or fans that don't spin at all. And if you have thermal monitoring, pay attention to it. Hard drives nowadays almost all have SMART on them, so find a program that can read those stats and see if your drive is giving out warnings. Many vendors include software for monitoring your system health (I know HP and Compaq do, and I think IBM does too but I haven't looked). There are 3rd party programs for all that as well. And of course, overclocking is pushing the limits anyway, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised to find that overclocking may ruin a CPU. I do find it curious that the thermal protection on your P4 didn't kick in, but perhaps your computer's BIOS had some default settings disabling that? Or it had been disabled? I dunno... I don't have a P4 machine (yet), so I can't say. :) In short, I've killed many machines in my life... CPU fans that stopped working and thus frying the processor, or doing silly things like plugging a 486 in the wrong way, etc. And of all the machines I've fried, NONE were running Prime95. Heck, I guess I'd have to say that running Prime95 on a machine has actually brought me better luck with them than without. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Steve Elias Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 11:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: slaying cpus with prime95 here are some instances where i have damaged computers by (capriciously?) running prime95! 1 - i just got my wife's toshiba laptop back from toshiba warranty service. running prime95 for ~6 months on it caused the fan to die, and then the laptop would overheat shutdown even without prime95 running. apparently the heat caused lots of disk badblocks too. 2 - my manager at work here had a thinkpad. he ran prime95 despite my worry that it was very tough on laptops. within a few months his harddrive failed - possibly due to months of excess heat... :| this could be considered a classic Dilbertian CLM (career limiting move) on my part, but no worry since my manager is super-cool. 3 - i also ran the prime95 app for a year or so on an ancient cyrix p120+ which had a cpu-fan that stopped. after a couple months of no-cpu-fan, that cpu died completely... 4 - i bought a 2Ghz P4 recently. despite initial worries that it was running too hot (70 C) because fan was too slow (2800 rpm), i got adventurous and clocked the cpu at 2.1 Ghz for a day. weeks later the machine started acting very badly (motherboard cpu temp alarm caused shutdown @ 90 C even without prime95 running). so i returned it to the vendor. they claimed that my overclocking it broke the P4, and that the top of the cpu was actually burnt/blackened from the heat. this is counter to my belief that improper fan/heatsink was the cause, but i can't prove it. also it runs counter to what i've read here elsewhere about the thermal-protection built into P4s 1.7Ghz or faster. they are returning the P4 to intel to see if Intel will replace it for free, but in the meantime i have to pay for a new cpu! (i'm picking 1.8Ghz this time.) so far my count is 4 for computers i've damaged with the help of the the prime95 application. but i'll keep running it because it is the coolest application around (in a hot way). /eli _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: M4 completely factored!
I do note that 4 is not prime, thus this is not a factoring of M4, but rather just a more mundane factoring success. :) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 12:03 PM To: Henk Stokhorst Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: M4 completely factored! On 20 Dec 2001, at 9:57, Henk Stokhorst wrote: L.S., Another milestone has been acomplished. M4 has been completely factored, two factors were found, 2^4 -1 = 15 = 3 * 5. more details at http://slashdot.org/ see: IBM builds a limited quatum computer. Wow! Are we _really_ sure they didn't find 2^4-1 = 3_+_5? You never know with this scary quantum stuff! I expect the IBM team will find the next 100 Mersenne primes sometime before the end of this year. Oh well, I suppose there's always seti@home ;-) Seasonal felicitations Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Re: 2^4-1 Factored!
Its when they start producing near instant factors of 1024 to 4096 bit numbers that well have to really think about our current encryption measures Even if they reduced the time it took to factor such numbers from millions of years to millions of seconds, the impact on cryptography will be huge. But I reckon that by then, someone will have thought of some new encryption that would remove the advantage that QC has something unrelated to factoring large numbers, Im guessing? Dunno what that method might be; if I did know, Id market it and get rich. J Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 2:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Re: 2^4-1 Factored! Luke Welsh wrote: http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20011219_quantum.shtml Interesting...but the QC folks apprently seem to think classical factoring work is frozen in time, viz. their comment about the supposed unfactorizability of 200-digit composites. M727 is larger than 200 digits, and has a smallest prime factor of 98 digits. Of course when QC comes into its own, 200-digit numbers will be factored almost instantly. But we aren't there yet. -Ernst
RE: Mersenne: silly, but...
That is VERY strange... and I feel compelled to try and beat the current record of watching it get to above 52,490,219 :) May take me a while, but oh well... :) Good find. I got a laugh out of it. Just goes to prove my point that some people have WAY too much free time. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of John R Pierce Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 9:36 PM To: Mersenne discussion list Subject: Mersenne: silly, but... Ok, this is kinda silly, and if you are easily offended, don't go here.. but if you have a bent sense of humor (on topic for this list), check out the Prime Bear at. (requires a late model browser that handles java scripting reasonably well) http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Speed of RAM
Questions like this are fine. :) We talk about stuff like this from time to time. F'rinstance, I have some Compaq servers where the video goes totally haywire when Prime95 is running on them (only at 1024x768... works fine at 800x600). Turns out the built in graphics stuff is a bit too close to the processors, so there's a bit of interference going on. I would suspect the same behaviour in your case. Do you notice the sound coming from the built in speaker? Or is it somewhere else? Capacitors have a neat trick of making high pitched noises like you described, though the type found on motherboards are usually a bit too small for such shenanigans, but you never know. Slowing down the bus speed must have eliminated whatever resonance was going on. As for whether your results will be okay or not, there are a few built in checks in George's algorithm, so most hardware related things are generally caught (correct George?) and it is able to revert to the last time it saved the temp file in such cases. You can take a look in your results.txt file to see if there are any unusual errors in there. No real way to tell what your lockup problems are. If it only happened when you did certain things (mouse movements or something), then maybe you have some issues with the hardware related to the PS/2 interface... just a wild guess based on what you've said. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Philip Whittington Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 8:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Speed of RAM Hello All, I'm sorry to trouble GIMPSers with what might be more of a computer question. I am using an Athon Thunderbird 1.3GHz and 256 MB of 133 MHz (DDR) Ram. My computer has always emitted a high pitched squeaking noise when processes like GIMPS start, and also when I do things like use the scroll wheel of my mouse etc. Recently the computer started hanging randomly on certain tasks (not GIMPS). After having taken the RAM down to 100MHz the high pitched squeak and the hanging has stopped. 1) Will the hanging have any impact on the credibility of what PRIME95 finds - I am around 86% through a L-L Test? 2) Can anyone shed light on whether it is my ram at fault or something on the motherboard? (sorry, I realise this is not really GIMPS related) Thank you, Philip Whittington _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Database merge
Yay! It has been a LONG time since the last one. My list of cleared exponents was getting pretty huge. Just out of curiosity though, I'm wondering why some of my cleared exponents are still there... like these ones: 8664941 65 0x87838CA31D64B5__ 16-Jun-00 07:44 WorkerBoy2 9885119 65 0x86BA14ED5C3785__ 25-Dec-00 13:45 NYFS-1 There are others from 2001, but those two from 2000 had me puzzled. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of George Woltman Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 7:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Database merge Hi all, Brad at Entropia did a long awaited database merge last night. Thanks, Brad. Due to an oversight in my scripts, the compressed binary database that Brad merges in only had data for exponents below 16 million. Thus, all factoring and LL results on exponents above 16 million were not cleared out. We will get them next time. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Moving an assignment
If it's just one exponent, cut and paste that line from the worktodo.ini file and copy your temp files (p? and q?) to the other machine. And just start 'er up. Even though it's not assigned to you, an exponent that has already been started work on will not be released. It'll just complain each time you update results that the exponent is not assigned to you, but it will still finish it up and you'll still get credit for it when you're all done. I know this from my poaching days. ;) If work hasn't already begun on it, then there's probably no good reason to transfer it anyway, so I'm sure we're talking about work in progress. Much easier than the methods below. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Nathan Russell Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 2:17 PM To: Mary Conner; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Moving an assignment At 12:41 PM 12/12/2001 -0800, Mary Conner wrote: How would I go about giving an exponent I've been assigned to someone else? From previous discussions, it seems as though PrimeNet would reject the assignment as not belonging to him, but I've seen exponents moved from one account to another without expiring, so I know it can be done. I haven't been able to find any option on Prime95's menus, or anything on the web page about how to do this so that PrimeNet will accept the reassignment. To begin with, several important people in the GIMPS project, and many people who know far more than I do about it, read this list. It'd likely be best not to follow my advice until you see if any of them have a better idea. That said, the server only assigns a new assignment every few minutes. If you were to release the assignment at a time of the day when the server isn't busy (check the assignments out report to get a feeling for when that is) and, coordinating by instant messaging, on the phone, etc, the other user were to (having increased his number of days of work to queue significantly) manually request work (in the advanced menu), there's a fair chance he'd get the exponent you'd just released. You could then send him the save file. The other alternative, of course, and likely a better one, would be to email the folks at PrimeNet and ask them if they could manually transfer the assignment to the other user's account. Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: HD crash
Best idea is to look at your account status page and find the exponents for that machine on there. I made the mistake of rebuilding my laptop the other day and while I had backed up everything else, I forgot to backup the directory with ntprime. Argh... fortunately it wasn't too far along on the current exponent. Just rebuilt the worktodo.ini file with the appropriate test=,xx lines (optionally add the ,1 on the end if it had already completed the p-1 factoring) and let 'er rip. At least on my machines at home I try to be better about at least making weekly backups of the prime directories on there. For my machines at work, they don't suffer the same wipe and rebuild fate as many of my home test machines, so I don't bother backing them up much, which of course is why I lost the stuff on my work laptop. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jud McCranie Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 12:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: HD crash My hard drive crashed, and I have almost certainly lost all of the GIMPS data for the exponent I was working on and 4 more I had in the queue. The initial trial factorization had been done on all of them and the first one was just about 4 days from completion. What should I do about these lost exponents? (I don't know which ones they were) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Meanwhile, in another part of the planet
I would think that upon official verification of M39 (as in, 39th *known* one anyway), everyone, no matter where they are, should raise a toast to their fellow GIMPSers... There's always that one lucky guy or gal who actually manages to find one, but it's still a team effort, because none of this would be at all possible if it weren't for the thousands of machines out there, plugging away each and every hour of each and every day. Meanwhile, I'm estimating whether it would be worthwhile to take a scenic drive down the coast from Seattle to join the fellow prime hunters in the Bay area. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Halliday, Ian Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2001 10:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Meanwhile, in another part of the planet I'm just quietly reading about the possibly enormous and possibly tiny party to celebrate the discovery of M39. Is there anyone who would care to join me for a couple of quiet beers in Wellington, New Zealand to celebrate the same event? Expressions of interest or flames to me off the list please. Thank you. Regards, Ian _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: prime
Bummer... it doesn't show that anymore. :( George/Scott: can one of you verify what the situation is? Finding a new one, even unverified, is big news, but if it's a glitch, we'd want to know so we don't get our hopes up. :) Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Henk Stokhorst Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 1:10 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: prime L.S., from the status.shtml page: --- Mersenne Exponent Test State --- Assigned in Tests Cleared Since Last Synchronization Factoring only: 8683 Factored composite: 13505 Lucas-Lehmer testing : 27314 Lucas-Lehmer composite: 50306 Double-checking LL: 8158 Double-checked LL : 34091 Prime, VERIFIED : 1 Prime, UNVERIFIED : 1 -- --- -- --- TOTAL : 44155 TOTAL : 97904 YotN, Henk _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: prime
Hey, no fair... you're not going to share the results of your investigation? :) I guess we can all wait for verification... sigh... -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Dieter Schmitt Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 5:32 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: prime Hi, at November 1, I saved a copy of Assignments Report. Today I downloaded the new Assignments Report and the Cleared Exponents Report. Stored the three files into a database. Knowing the new prime exponent probably had been listed at Nov. 1 but isn't listed today .. that's enough. Doing a query for inconsistency between the two Assignments Reports and another query for inconsistency between the first query result and the Cleared Exponents Report yields only a few possible entries 3.500.000 digits (10). I didn't look for more than 10.000.000 digits ;-) Checking these few possibilities (IPS account ID) against hrf5.txt for Who @GIMPS and searching GIMPS HomePage (Top Producers/expanded version/Who leaves only one entry matching the second condition (exponents tested = 3) :-) Of course, the new prime exponent may have been assigned after Nov., 1 .. Yours, Dieter Schmitt _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: SMT
I kind of like the practice that many dual processor folks have seem to adopted (and one which I'll be switching my group of computers too)... Namely, on dual CPU systems, have one Prime process doing LL tests, and have the other one doing trial factoring. Even on Compaq servers that have GREAT cache/memory management, running 2 LL tests on each CPU will slow down both processes. Running one LL and one factor reduces the hit on the memory subsystem since the factoring can generally remain in the CPU cache of it's respective processor, leaving the LL process to better use the memory for itself. So perhaps this same approach could be adopted for SMT? And just a reminder... trial factoring is still a great use of slower machines... I have an AMD K6-III 400 that can trial factor the current 17M exponents in just about 2 days. Yeah, P4's can do it a lot faster, or 1.2GHz Athlons, but I'd rather have those machines concentrate on the LL tests. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 1:36 PM To: Kel Utendorf Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: SMT On 3 Nov 2001, at 21:40, Kel Utendorf wrote: At 21:01 11/03/2001 -0500, George Woltman wrote: Can prime95 take advantage of SMT? I'm skeptical. If the FFT is broken up to run in two threads, I'm afraid L2 cache pollution will negate any advantage of SMT. Of course, I'm just guessing - to test this theory out we should compare our throughput running 1 vs. 2 copies of prime95 on an SMT machine. I'm not sure I fully understand the way in which a SMT processor would utilise cache. But I can't see how the problem could be worse than running two copies of a program on a SMP system. This seems to work fairly well in both Windows and linux regimes (attatching a thread to a processor and therefore its associated cache, rigidly in the case of Windows, loosely but intelligently in the case of linux). If an SMT processor has a unified cache, cache pollution should surely be not too much of a problem? Running one copy thereby getting benefit of the full cache size would run that one copy faster, (just as happens with SMP systems where memory bandwidth can be crucial) but the total throughput with two copies running would surely be greater. Especially on a busy system, where two threads get twice as many timeslices as one! If there is some way in which the FFT could be broken down into roughly equal sized chunks, it _might_ be worth synchronizing two streams so that e.g. transform in on one thread was always in parallel with transform out on the other, and vice versa. Obviously you'd need to be running on two different exponents but using the same FFT length to gain from this technique. Whether this would be any better than running unsynchronized would probably require experimentation. Could things be setup so that factoring and LL-testing went on simultaneously? This would speed up the overall amount of work being done. Because trial factoring, or P-1/ECM on _small_ exponents, have a very low memory bus loading, running a LL test and factoring in parallel on a dual-processor SMP system makes a lot of sense. I suspect the same situation would apply in an SMT environment. The problem of mass deployment (almost everyone in this position, instead of only a few of us) is that there is a great deal of LL testing effort required in comparison to trial factoring, so running two LL tests in parallel but inefficiently would bring us to milestones faster than the efficient LL/trial factoring split. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: What will we do when anyone finds a number of 10 million+ digits which is prime?
Well, there's still plenty of people who'll stick to it. There's a lot of hardcore GIMPSers who are more than willing to keep crunching numbers alive (some even willing to risk getting the FBI on their case) :) Besides the big ticket things like finding the megadigit prime and a ten megadigit prime, there's still all the other work of testing all the exponents in between, confirming that Mersenne Prime XX is really the XXth prime (and we didn't just miss any in-between). There's the double-checking work, and I still think it's cool when I find a really big factor (anything over 80 bits is fun to find) of a Mersenne number. I'm sure a lot of folks would just give up, but personally, I'd contribute to some fund for a prize for the other Prime numbers we find along the way. Just my 2 cents worth. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Torben Schlüntz Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 3:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: What will we do when anyone finds a number of 10 million+ digits which is prime? What will we do when anyone finds a number of 10 million+ digits which is prime? Will everybody just leave the project because there is no prize to gain any longer? After the introduction of search for 10 million digits number this could leave the project with quite a big hole, say from M14.xxx.xxx and up till the exponent found. It will be kind of difficult to find new volunteers that will use time and electricity to fill the hole if nothing more than glory is won. Will there be an other prize? Will there be a new goal? We have the 4 or 5 biggest primes, are anyone stressing us by using another algorithm like the LL, have access to more CPU, working on a bulletproof method of generating new primes? br tsc _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Re: What will we do when anyone finds a number of 10 million+ digits which is prime?
Hmm... in games of chance, each game's outcome is independent of the results of past games, so that is a valid point. In Mersenne Prime hunting though, I think it's safe to say that statistically there should be some prime numbers in the range we're checking, so the more we *don't* find, the higher the odds of the remaining ones being prime. :) In other words, there is a certain sort of dependence on previous outcomes. In gambling terms, that's like saying that perhaps you could guarantee winning one game out of every 50 hands of poker (alright, so he's a lousy player). If you lost 49 times, and you know you would win 1 out of 50 times, then yes, there's a 100% chance you'll win the next hand. :) What's a bigger issue here is whether or not the statistical model for how many primes we expect to find in a given range is accurate or not. Since the probabilities are based purely on the spread of previous primes, the sample data is pretty small, and there's already a jagged curve to the whole thing, so any probabilities are likely to be off by a good amount in practice. I know we did lots of analyses prior to finding the last one, and I'm curious how well that # fit any of the odds people had formulated. Aaron -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Nathan Russell Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 5:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: What will we do when anyone finds a number of 10 million+ digits which is prime? On Sun, 04 Nov 2001 20:09:20 -0500, Jud McCranie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 01:43 AM 11/5/2001 +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: Speaking of which -- shouldn't we be (statistically) really close to finding a new prime soon? Yes, statistically. You'd expect the next one to be before 14,000,000 and I've got assignments in the 13,000,000 range. However, all exponents have been checked once only to a little past 8,000,000. Of course, this whole argument makes (as far as I can see) heavy use of the gamblers' fallacy, aka the fallacy of maturation of probabilities (Hey, I lost the last 50 games - what are the odds against me losing 51 5-man games in a row? I'm certain to win!) Nathan _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: [Fwd: Luke Welsh's Email Address]
Luke: I'd volunteer to host a site for you in the short term if you were interested... I'd also volunteer to host the Mersenne list on our mail server since our mail server has a license for unlimited lists, browse-able archives, etc. Just holler. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Halliday, Ian Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 8:38 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: [Fwd: Luke Welsh's Email Address] Luke, the list owner, is in the process of changing hosting services. I haven't heard from him since he sent me the following, which suggests that the link is dead, but that he will be sorting it out. Regards, Ian Original Message Subject: Luke Welsh's Email Address From: Luke Welsh Hello Everybody-- Well, it looks line my dear, old, original ISP is finally calling it quits. Sad. Soon my personal email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], will cease to exist. I'll find a new home for my Mersenne pages, link-rot and all. But this may not happen for some time. I will try to get a larger disk quota so I can host the Mersenne-Digest mailing list archives. On the plus side, my spam-o-meter should register somewhat lower :-) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: SV: Mersenne: number of processors participating
One way to improve the performance in these circumstances is to reduce the minimum timeslice for low-priority processes. This will cause the task scheduler to be busier and therefore reduce the overall performance to some extent, but multimedia type applications will coexist much more happily with compute-intensive tasks if this is done. Sorry, I have no idea how to do this, or even whether it is possible, in any of the versions of Windows. There is a program that can set the quanta for programs... let me find that durned thing... Aha. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/frob.shtml Good old sysinternals... they have the neatest tools. Apparently that's just for NT4 machines (I think...). For Win2K (and presumably XP?), they have another page that tells you about the settings on there, and to wait for a new version of Frob that works with win2k. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/info/nt5.shtml Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: AthlonXP
First, the point about XP running on a 286 if it were optimized... I was being facetious. Didn't think people would take me literally. That being said, I'll modify that and say it could run on a *386*. :) Maybe we're not understanding what is meant by microcode... The only CPU I've designed was a 4-bit system that didn't use microcode to get it's work done (it was for a class), so I can't claim direct experience, but I at least thought I knew what the word microcode implied... a level of abstraction, if you will, between the opcodes and the actual hardware... a reduced instruction set sitting there that could take some of those complex codes and break it down into the fundamental instructions. Anyway, that's why I said that a RISC processor has more flexibility in that regard, because you have a near 1-1 corellation with the opcodes and what the CPU is directly capable of, and any higher level things you want to do are up to the programmer. So, that was my understanding, at least, but if I'm wrong then I suppose it'd be good to be educated. :) Aaron - Original Message - From: Paul Leyland [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Aaron Blosser [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Mersenne@Base. Com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 8:45 AM Subject: RE: Mersenne: Re: AthlonXP Well, I suppose RISC is about as close as you can get to that. Microcode, for reasons best known to someone familiar with CPU design, is not something you can just reprogram on the fly... I beg to differ. As someone who has written megabytes of microcode, including an entire IEEE floating point instruction set, a C machine, a LispKit machine and a large chunk of a graph reduction machine in AMD 2900 series bit-slice ucode (that dates me!) I can state authoritatively that updating ucode on the fly is not necessarily hard. Just because modern cpus don't provide run-time loadable ucode (if anyone knows of present day examples, please let me know) doesn't mean that it's impossible. Indeed, the IA-64 architecture comes damned close to being a ucodable machine, as the assembly language is very low level in many respects. The main reason, IMO, why runtime loadable ucode isn't more widely available is that there is no perceived large market for it. We sold our machines primarily to labs who were researching machine architectures. Some years before that, DEC sold PDP-11/60 boxes with writable control store for organizations that needed fast and custom data capture. The nuclear and particle physics communities loved them. of it. Now, if all programmers were as concerned about optimizing code as George is, we could run Windows XP on a 286 system if you really wanted... optimized code can do wonders on even the slowest systems. :) Actually, a 286 would have big problems running WinXP, not least because its lack of support for demand paged virtual memory and inadequate kernel/user separation. That's why Linux requires at least a 386. Paul _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: AthlonXP
Well, I suppose RISC is about as close as you can get to that. Microcode, for reasons best known to someone familiar with CPU design, is not something you can just reprogram on the fly... But RISC instructions are made to map to microcode (or *is* the microcode), allowing a programmer to fine tune the higher level instructions in whatever way they see fit. All the other fancy schmancy CPU stuff just keeps the instruction pipelines churning along at top efficiency. That's the long and short of it. Now, if all programmers were as concerned about optimizing code as George is, we could run Windows XP on a 286 system if you really wanted... optimized code can do wonders on even the slowest systems. :) Aaron - Original Message - From: Steinar H. Gunderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 2:33 PM Subject: Mersenne: Re: AthlonXP On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 07:35:36PM -, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I would like to see in a CPU is a means where you could upload your own microcode, enabling design of specific instruction sets to handle particular problems very efficiently. What about (in an ideal world) just programming microcode directly, without having to make an extra instruction set on top of that? Suddenly, you would have both instant access to all the ports (or whatever the CPU makers call their execution units these days), a lot of registers, etc.. In addition, the problem with only a single decoder etc. on P4 would effectively go away entirely. The only problem I could see would be a lot more code having to go over the bus (and occupy more space in the instruction cache), especially as some people have pointed out that the microcode might very well be some form of VLIW :-) At least for us Linux users, having to recompile everything wouldn't be _that_ big of a problem -- source for about everything you'd need would be readily available (except that mprime would have to be ported, of course ;-) )... _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: FW: Mersenne: Re: Factoring Failure?
If we could indeed track these to a single user, I've got about 25-30 AMD 1.2 GHz processors that I could throw at the situation for a short time, just to quickly re-trial factor these and put our minds to rest. Aaron - Original Message - However if it could be established that all the missed factors reported were the work of one user, perhaps it would be worth fixing the database to force rerunning of trial factoring for those factoring assignments run by that user when the exponents are reassigned for double checking (or LL testing). Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Torture test passes but normal use fails!
Maybe it's a case of the new version working *too* good. The improvements to the code, like the prefetch, is doing such a good job of keeping the FPU busy that it heats up more and causes problems if you've overclocked. That'd be interesting, if true. Meanwhile, I hope and pray that any New York or DC (and other area) GIMPSers are okay. Aaron - Original Message - From: Canart Jean-Yves To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 9:03 AM Subject: FW: Mersenne: Torture test passes but normal use fails! I had thesame problemon my overclocked Athlon that started to produce SUMOUT errorswhen I upgraded prime95 to V21. At the same time, I saw that the processor temperature went up from 45° to 50° Celsius. To fix the problem, I had toreduce the overclockingand I lost 25% of speed improvements... Regards, Jean-Yves
Re: Mersenne: Prime Net Server
The thing is that even a 2-3 day outage is no big deal, because if we are all responsible GIMPSers, then we have our "days of work" configuration set to more than a couple days worth, right? So the worst that should have happened is that you have a result to check back in and have to wait for that while the next number is already crunching. :) - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 10:34 PM Subject: AW: Mersenne: Prime Net Server I beg your pardon: you didn´t really expect to get informed about a planned outage BEFORE it happens or a crash AFTER it happened, did you? If you did expect this, then you should have joined another distributed-computing project like SETI. They do inform their participants about such things. But people who are cool enough to find million-digit-primes should be able to find out that the server is down the whole weekend. Well, you have to pay for it (in Germany), but who cares? Such an outage didn´t occur for the first time in my (nearly) three years supporting GIMPS and others will follow. May be that´s one reason why GIMPS lost about 8.000 to 9.000 machines during the last six months. Regards Achim Ursprüngliche Nachricht-Von: Matt Goodrich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]Gesendet: Samstag, 8. September 2001 21:36An: Mersenne List (E-mail)Betreff: Mersenne: Prime Net Server Is there scheduled maint. going on with the server today, or is this a unscheduled outage? Matt
Re: Mersenne: NT / 2000 / XP users
Of course, I use the NT service version of Prime which installs itself as a service. Of course, as George mentioned, you don't get the nice user interface, but considering I run it on a bunch of lights out machines, I could care less about the interface. :) Plus, sometimes George doesn't get the NT service version out as soon as the Prime95 versions. :) - Original Message - From: Jeff Woods [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 5:25 PM Subject: Re: Mersenne: NT / 2000 / XP users At 07:41 PM 9/4/01 -0400, you wrote: Can someone explain to me why (and if) it's better to run Prime95 as a service under these OSs? Is there a speed advantage? Also, who would be serving whom? The primary advantage is that it remains running regardless of who (if anyone) is actually logged onto the box. Much in the same general concept of how mprime runs on Linux in the background of the context of the user ID that started it, mprime continues to run until killed, even if the user that started mprime logs off the Linux box. NT services are the same -- they AUTOMATICALLY start (if so configured) at bootup, and automatically start up in the context of a specific user (i.e. an auto-cron job on a Linux box, a user's start.start file), and runs until stopped, no matter who logs in or out of the machine. This can be of great benefit to those NT boxen that may be rebooted -- it's the only way to auto-start an application in that manner, without hacking the registry to automatically log a user onto the box, and that presents a security hole to fly the space shuttle through. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: Windows XP: Start at Bootup
So far as I know, the Run under HKLM will only run at system startup, so there's no risk of multiple instances there... but I'm not 100% sure if it runs right away, or if it waits until a user actually logs on... I think it might not run until there's a logon. If different users on a machine had an entry in HKCU for the Run, well, it would run under that user's context and then quit when they logout. No biggie, but if you had a terminal server with multiple users logged on at once, I guess you could get multiple instances running. Also, if it was set in the HKLM *and* in HKCU, you could get multiple instances... I know multiple instances of the program are allowed, for use in multi-processor system, but maybe there's some way to figure out if it's already running in that same directory, with the same ini files? just to prevent problems with two instances trying to use the same temp files and causing havoc, slowing the LL tests down, etc... dunno much about how that would be programmed. If running Prime95 (and not the NTPrime) as a service is what's trying to be done, then the SRVANY program from the resource kit can do that, but including that with the Prime package might not be legal, and would increase the size too, but it could certainly be scripted in any installer program (pretty easy to setup). - Original Message - From: George Woltman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Ethan O'Connor [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 8:57 AM Subject: RE: Mersenne: Re: Windows XP: Start at Bootup Hi, At 11:03 AM 8/31/2001 -0400, Ethan O'Connor wrote: The Start at bootup menu choice works fine for me on XP. Could this be a privileges issue? I notice that the registry key is in Run under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE rather than HKEY_CURRENT_USER, so I think you'll to be running prime95 with administrative privileges to create that key... My response: Prime95 tries to create the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE entry first. If that fails, then it tries to create the HKEY_CURRENT_USER entry. Perhaps there is a bug in this new code, but I cannot test it out here. Any insights would be appreciated. Also, I noticed in browsing Microsoft's web site that XP allows different users to logon at the same time. Does this cause any problems if both users try to run prime95 from the same folder? I don't think so, but an actual test would be nice. Thanks, George _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Proth observations
Windows NT and Win2000 users should consider changing prime95's priority to two. There have been reports that idle priority doesn't work as documented in the Microsoft documentation. I'd be curious about that... I haven't heard anything, but then I haven't looked either. :) As I've said before, the only time I've ever seen an actual program run slower when Prime95/NT was running is when I'm running any sort of video capture, such as NetMeeting. NetMeeting vid conferences just run DOG slow when I have my ntprime going, but if I stop the service, then the video picks up greatly. I figured that perhaps the codec just ran at idle priority also (which would make sense to me anyway), so you have two CPU intensive things competing for resources... Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: taxifornia brownout
You may have heard that our so-called Governor, here in the great state of Taxifornia has proposed replacing rolling blackouts with universal brownouts: reducing line voltage about 10-15% on hot days this summer. Any guesses at how that will effect a computer running GIMPS? Power supplies in today's PC's can usually switch fine down to 80-90 V AC. However, running like that for prolonged periods can cause problems in the long run since it forces the switching supply to run less efficiently. Also, brownouts can be really bad on motors. They have to work harder with less voltage and can easily burn out with as little as a 10% reduction in potential. In fact, for air conditioners, refrigerators, fans, etc. it's better to just turn them off during brownouts, otherwise you may be quite displeased to find that your refrigerator's condenser has pooped out on you, or that your ceiling fan is making unusual grinding noises now. Brownouts can even cause fires when marginal motors start to burn out and actually combust. No... that's why rolling blackouts are a MUCH better alternative than simply reducing line voltage. If they overdid it, you'd be creating much more problems. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: SUMOUT errors
I also opened up the machine this past weekend and cleaned out some dust, in addition to removing and reinserting the memory, which had become slightly loose at one end. I also fixed the plastic air-directing device over the CPU, which was a little loose and causing some annoying noises. I'm always surprised (well, not really) at how incredibly dusty some people's machines can get. Maybe I'm just obsessive/compulsive, but I regularly clean all my systems at least every 2 months or so. :) Shut it down, take the can of compressed air and give it a good dusting. It wouldn't surprise me at all if a layer of dust sitting on your CPU or memory were causing overheating problems in some way or another. In humid areas, the dust will tend to absorb moisture and make a sticky residue which I'm sure could even cause shorting. Matter of fact, I had an old monitor I used to tote around with me... when I moved from Denver to Raleigh, I noticed the monitor would, every now and then, just short itself out in a brilliant display. Then it'd start working again. Finally I opened it up and saw that it had been arcing across some traces on the board where the humid air obviously was just too good a conductor to pass up. Why this monitor maker (some generic Korean company or another) chose to put higher voltage traces so near to lower potential traces, I have no idea. But more interesting was that in the dry Colorado air, I never had a problem. Only the muggy atmosphere of North Carolina set it off. Once I moved back to Colorado, it worked great again. My little bro and I could tell stories from when we both worked at a computer store. In one case, guy having problems brought his machine in and there were actually spiders living inside the thing. Dunno if he used this thing in a barn or what, but that was interesting. Usually the bugs we saw were already dead, but not always. Sort of gives new life to the term debugging. SUMOUT errors could also be the result of improperly seated CPU or memory, so I'm glad you reseated all that... may have made more of a difference than merely cleaning it out. During my USWEST escapade (just celebrated the 3 year anniversary of being caught, by the way), I was keeping track of which machines were having problems. I think I saw about 4 or 5 machines of the 3500 or so. I was going to send that list to the techs in those areas to have them reseat things to see if that was the problem, but of course I never had the chance. Somewhere, US WEST (now Qwest) and the FBI have a list of machines with flaky hardware... hopefully they checked them out and fixed them. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Normal behaviour? - Re: Mersenne: Strange behaviour
Guido, How much RAM is in your machine? Those large exponents can easily use a large chunk of memory when doing the P-1 testing, if I recall correctly. A relatively small amount of RAM could cause some serious paging to occur if it's running low. And it's normal for it to do a new test for a new FFT size. Your local.ini file should have lines in there indicating which FFT sizes it's done a test on already. I'd recommend letting it run those tests so it can make sure the boundaries are working right on your machine. Aaron - -- Original Message -- - Don't like to take up your time, but the behaviour of Prime95 on a 750@795 Duron, P-1 factoring on 33.3mio exponent (B1=35 and B2=4025000), is quite strange. The Duron completed the stage 1 without any problem, but during the stage 2 the time per iteration has slow down a lot, from 0.650 sec/it to many minutes for just one iteration. Above all the pc is unusable, so I've decided to edit manually worktodo.ini: fromTest=33306743,68,0 to Test=33306743,68,1 to force prime95 to skip the factoring stage when the process was done for about 30% (The intermediate file mX306743 sizes 8,132 KB). I've tried to put everything on another machine but with no results: the behaviour was the same. Skipping the P-1 factoring stage shouldn't invalidate the LL test, as George says in undoc.txt: You can force prime95 to skip the trial factoring step prior to running a Lucas-Lehmer test. In prime.ini add this line: SkipTrialFactoring=1 By the way: I've done it but apparently nothing has changed. If I've understood properly, adding this line is like to manually edit worktodo.ini. Isn't it? Is it better if I force prime95 to start p-1 factoring from zero once again, hoping any problem occurs this time? What may be the problem? Has anybody ever observed something like this? Last question: is it normal that prime95 runs a self test each time it is going to test with different FFT sizes? Thank you in advance for answering and best regards from Italy. Guido72 _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Various ways of changing horses in mid-stream
Here's what I do. I just copy the prime.spl file from my non-connected machine to my connected machine, and it'll send the result from that one. No muss, no fuss. Your credit screen shows that the machine you connected from is actually the one that did the work, but oh well. Yes, that makes more sense than my suggestion - if only because prime.spl isn't big enough to cause complications due to fragmentation when using conventional 1.44 MByte sneakernet packets ;-) The way I figured it, that prime.spl file simply has the results to send to the server, so it wouldn't really matter if it was sent from the server that actually did the work or not. Doesn't seem to make any difference, so I'm happy. I'd be happier with my DSL connection back. :( (OT) What's up with DSL in the US at the moment? There seems to be a sudden spate of problems with several DSL service providers! Good question. My problem is because I was a PhoenixDSL customer that was sold to Megapath and then sold to Telocity. Telocity is now DirectTV DSL. Good grief... changing hands that many times, I'm not surprised they've had me out of service for a month and a half. When I made my daily call to tech support to URGE them to do something, the recorded message mentioned an outage in (Chicago maybe?) it said that it was expected to be down for about a week. A whole city out for maybe a week. Yow! My guess is that the economy, being in this tech downturn, is having an effect now. Companies are laying off employees since that's usually the easiest short term way to cut costs. Of course this creates other long term hassles, like service tickets piling up beyond belief, but aren't the shareholders happy? :) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Various ways of changing horses in mid-stream
6) Finally, the result can be submitted using the PrimeNet manual assignment form - or, since you will be using Prime95 or mprime, you could copy a very late Pnnn save file to the connected system using sneakernet, add the assignment line back into its worktodo.ini file _at the beginning_ then stop restart the client so that the last few iterations are run on the connected system (as well as the unconnected system) the result sent automatically. This latter method is a bit messier but does let you get the CPU credit. George and/or Steve would probaby roll over in their ... well, not a grave since they're both quite alive... Here's what I do. I just copy the prime.spl file from my non-connected machine to my connected machine, and it'll send the result from that one. No muss, no fuss. Your credit screen shows that the machine you connected from is actually the one that did the work, but oh well. I only know this because my home network is currently lacking it's DSL connection (darn Telocity!) so I dialup from another machine and copy results from each of my 6 other boxes. Of course when my DSL works, it all goes through a router. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Different results
1) When testing a new Pc, I obtain two different results from the old and the new one M9357637 is not prime. Res64: BCB1164E6826255E. WW1: C4F561C3,5448242, M9357637 is not prime. Res64: BCB1164E6826255E. WW1: C4F261C3,5448242,0003 Are this results compatible ? 2) I often restart my new PC (for installation purpose of windows 98 se ...). It seems Prime95 is beginning the calculus two early (?) and produce ILLEGAL SUMOUT ERROR. Instead of waiting five minutes, I can stop prime (test/stop menu) then continue (test/ continue menu). Theire are no more errors after that. Is there any way to delay prime95 starting calculus by one minute at boot time ? Yup, it's the same. The Res64 is what's important there... it's the residue left over after the final iteration (just the last 64 bits worth anyway...) The WW1 is part of Scott's security check, just to make sure it's not been falsely generated or some such. I assume part of it is related to the date, time, or some other such thing which is why there's one part that's different? If you want to delay Prime95 starting up... hmm...not sure why you'd want to do that, but... Perhaps instead of having it run as a service, you could just put it in your startup group so it doesn't run until you logon. Or, make a batch file and use the SLEEP.EXE program (well, I know it comes with the NT Resource Kit, and there's something similar for Win9x as well) that'll wait for 60 seconds and then launch prime95. That can be setup in the runservices key so it starts when the system boots. Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: Different results
On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 07:47:10AM -0700, Aaron Blosser wrote: The WW1 is part of Scott's security check, just to make sure it's not been falsely generated or some such. I assume part of it is related to the date, time, or some other such thing which is why there's one part that's different? Wouldn't the last part be the shift count? Um, could be. :) Let's face it, I'm not 100% sure what the last part is there. I know there's the security check, but I dunno what the other stuff is. You're probably right. :) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Differences betwixt NTPrime and Prime95
Hmm... well, then again, I'm looking at the NTPrime. I've only got one machine running Prime95, and it's been so long... I thought it had all the same options though, but I could just be terribly mistaken. Running NTSetup (part of the NT service package), I show version 20.6.5... I have version 20.6.1 - and the web page reads that all versions were last updated June 15 2000. Something odd is going on... Turns out that Prime95 is indeed 20.6.1 and NTPrime shows up as 20.6.5. And yes, NTSetup will show the option I mentioned above, but Prime95 only has a checkmark for receiving occassional newsletters. How interesting. Well, clears up that mystery. Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Emails and virus (slightly OT) :)
Sorry, I just felt the urge to say this. There is nothing particualarily bad about Outlook Express, these various viruses require you to excute attachments, and you can do that in any mail client.. If any other mail client gets as popular as OE, then it will start to have viruses aimed at it's address book too! Chris, I don't think he was bashing Outlook PER SE -- just the version number in question. There have been MANY MANY security fixes to OE since that release, which came with Internet Explorer FOUR a few years back. Even the granola OE that comes with IE 5 (v5.00.2314.1300) has been radically security-patched since release FWIW, one of the best ways to protect your email against virii is at the server level. My current job involves, among other things, administering a couple hundred email domains, and I'm just appalled to see all the viruses that pass through our system each and every day. There are a LOT of viruses out there, and a LOT of people who have no scanning. Of course, we've got our system set to block all VBS files, and we only grudginly allow EXE's (we do scan them though). And of course, in our own company, it was easy enough to just set VBS files to auto-open with notepad rather than running via wscript, merely by changing the default file association. I'll try to keep this a little bit on-topic... Does this mailing list do any sort of virus scanning? I know you can't post to the list unless you're actually on the list, but any scanning going on? Hopefully the folks on this list are bright enough that they know better than to run any executables they receive via email... Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Emails and virus (slightly OT) :)
I'll try to keep this a little bit on-topic... Does this mailing list do any sort of virus scanning? I know you can't post to the list unless you're actually on the list, but any scanning going on? No there isn't any virus scanning going on. There is however a message limit that tends to block most attachments. FWIW, I work at Postini, http://www.postini.com , a company that provides real time email spam and virus blocking services. Customers simply point their MX records at us, and then we take care of the rest, filtering stuff out, and passing on just the good mail. I don't however run base.com mail through Postini. base.com provides me a portal on the net without the Postini filters in place. This is useful for collecting spam which can then be used to tune Postini's spam filtering engine. I was just wondering... that Homepage virus that was going around last week was actually relatively small. I don't know what size limits you have on the list, but it did cross my mind: what would happen if someone got a virus and had [EMAIL PROTECTED] in their address book (as I do). As for blocking spam, I created a spam user and try to advertise that as much as possible, hoping it'll get on as many lists as there are. The email software we use, Communigate, will reject any email that has that spamtrap user as one of the recipients. Works fine for those spammers that use to: or cc: fields, but not really much help for the bcc. Oh well. I wonder... could the base.com be setup to block all attachments, or, for that matter, block HTML posts, allowing text only? Aaron (who is currently fighting off some spam of his own... grid.net user bouncing off mindspring.net and then into our machines... argh!) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Emails and virus (slightly OT) :)
Sorry, I just felt the urge to say this. There is nothing particualarily bad about Outlook Express, these various viruses require you to excute attachments, and you can do that in any mail client.. Not true! With Outlook Express all you have to do is read the message. The virus can be embedded in the message with Outlook Express. The Wscript.KakWorm virus is a particularly bad example of this. For details see: http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/wscript.kakworm.html Well, that's true if you haven't upgraded your IE with the latest security patches, and especially true if you're security zones are left at the default which allow all sorts of nonsense to go on. Call me paranoid (Hey, paranoid!), but setting your security zones in IE to be more restrictive is absolutely vital. I'm puzzled as to why older versions of IE were so lax. I haven't tried it, but my co-workers who are more daring have said that the IE6 beta actually does a better job of restricting your sites more, so the Internet site allows less monkey-business. The Kakworm, fortunately, never made it big time, but you're right, that was a fine example of an HTML email actually being able to cause some damage. One can only ponder what would have happened had it spread better. Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Overriding assigned exponent type (was Re: Mersenne: Re: 26 exponents)
Secondly, if - when I ask the server to give me whatever kind of work makes most sense - it gives me something else, whether out of spurious concern for my feelings or for any other reason, then not only are the programmers betraying my trust in them, they are also indicating that they don't trust me to ask for what I want. I agree. Either you allow people to choose the type of work they want, or you tell people plainly that you will select for them the type of work you will ask them to do. Either works, but a mixture is inconsistent. I'm confused... I know there's the option to have Primenet request whatever type of work makes the most sense, or you can uncheck that and select a particular type. That works fine. However, if you do select multiple options, the server will still select which, from among those options, is most suitable for your machine. Personally, I'd always wondered why it let you select multiple types when the point was to override any server default and get the type you want. It should be a radio box instead of a combo box on that one, near as I can figure. ... Clearly this is ridiculous. I don't have a problem with George offerring a few exponents selectively through this list, because the list does not have a closed membership. The only sane alternative is to wait for deadline critical assignments to complete in the normal way - something which some people have vociferously objected to. Agreed with that, Brian. Besides, people on this list are probably more interested in what's going on than the fellow who just likes knowing that his computer is doing something with all those spare cycles. So offering limited cool things to list subscribers is fine by me. Perhaps there could be an option somewhere in the user information (same place you set your email address) that would allow you to opt in to the mailing list? I fear that many folks may not be aware of the list, or find that subscribing seems too hard (odd as that may sound to us experts :) Next time they're online, it'll update their computer info, generate a subscribe letter for that email address, and they'd still have to respond to the subscribe message, but it's a heckuva lot easier for some people that way. Of course, it would require Scott to do something on Primenet to allow such an option to be trackable, and to generate the subscribe messages to the list. But I reckon you'd see the list membership jump up quite a bit if only it was easier for folks to subscribe. Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Purpose of the self-test; also, aren't P4s fast!
The P4's PSU fan seems to step up a gear when I've been running Prime95 for a few hours, though the CPU temperature reported by Intel Active Monitor on my D850GB board doesn't go about 46C. I suspect the P4 probably runs too hot for it to be possible to build a really quiet solution, but does anyone have suggestions? In its current state I'd get no sleep if I left the machine running overnight, so I'll probably be running Prime95 only if I remember to set it going when I wake up. Any machine that has a variable speed fan will probably have this same thing happen. On a couple newer Compaq Proliant servers (which have temperature sensitive fans), it's very obvious to tell when I've started the Prime service, because the fans nearly instantly speed up and are noisier. This is, of course, because normally the CPU is pretty idle, not generating much heat at all. But when the service starts, the FPU is suddenly in full time use, and the core generates more heat, which causes the temp switch to notice this, and causes the fans to speed up to dissipate the extra heat. Hearing your fans kick into high gear is a good sign... it means your system is working as intended. :) I'm thankful that most of my servers are off in an air-conditioned room down the hall a bit. It was a real pain when I had a Proliant cluster in my office undergoing some testing, and having those fans spin at full tilt. And if you've ever been around a Proliant server, you'll know what I mean because those things have about a million different fans in them. 33M ticks per iteration for M5171311, which is 25.8 milliseconds on this 1300MHz machine; so one double-check in that range every 36 hours. That's about a factor six faster than the P2/350 I just sold, and I recall that machine as having been at least four times faster than the P90 I had when I started running Prime95 ... I'll have done noticeably more calculation by the end of next month than that P90 did during its lifetime. Hmm... your P4 at 1.3GHz should, on face value, be 3.8 times faster, and according to George, you should be seeing an extra 3 times improvement in the P4 execution for an overall boost (over a P2/350) of over 11 times. Of course, that's assuming similar cache architecture, bus speeds, etc. which we know isn't the case. In fact, without the new code, I'd expect a P4 1300 to be more than 3.8 times faster than P2/350, just on the basis of the memory architecture, FSB (and thus memory) speeds, etc. I assume your beta has been configured with the proper CPU type? Aaron _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: missing exponents?
On 14 May 2001, at 19:04, Brian J. Beesley wrote: There is already a mechanism where people can opt in or out of being notified if an assignment is due to expire. There is? At the risk of looking dim, what is it? In the user information config window, you enter your email address and there's a checkbox to receive email from Primenet server if exponents are about to expire. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: missing exponents?
Hmm... well, then again, I'm looking at the NTPrime. I've only got one machine running Prime95, and it's been so long... I thought it had all the same options though, but I could just be terribly mistaken. Running NTSetup (part of the NT service package), I show version 20.6.5... Aaron - Original Message - On Mon, 14 May 2001 17:27:19 -0700, Aaron Blosser wrote: On 14 May 2001, at 19:04, Brian J. Beesley wrote: There is already a mechanism where people can opt in or out of being notified if an assignment is due to expire. There is? At the risk of looking dim, what is it? In the user information config window, you enter your email address and there's a checkbox to receive email from Primenet server if exponents are about to expire. I can't find this in my copy (Prime95 20.6.1). Nathan _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Slow CPU's in a Proliant 2500
Besides other nefarious things I'm known for, I am also a Compaq ASE, so hopefully that'll carry some weight in my response. :) I have just upgraded a Proliant 2500 from dual PPro 200's to dual Pentium II 333 overdrive processors. ... Now before I upgraded, I was running double check's on 2 exponents, 668. I was getting about .515 second iteration times. Now that I have upgraded, I am only getting .448 second iteration times. Might it just be the effect of slower cache? As I recall, the numbers were: P Pro256 or 512K one CPU clock to deliver data P II 512 K two Celeron 128 K one and on some tasks, Celeron outperforms P II at the same clock because of this. One problem is most likely due to the Pentium II Overdrive's cache architecture which, if I recall correctly (I hate abbreviations), runs at half-speed like the other PII's. The PPro cache ran at full speed, and the Proliant 2500 (and I've got a couple of the 2500's around) came with 512MB L2 cache chips, but could be ordered with the 1MB or 2MB L2 PPro's also... believe me, even on a 200 MHz machine, that extra cache, and running at full speed, does make a difference. Sure, a PII running at 333 would be faster, but you have to deduct speed points for the smaller cache (256K I think) running at half the full speed (166 MHz, even less than the cache on a PPro 200)... Also, please DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT replace the BIOS chips on your 2500 with the E50 BIOS. There are a LOT more differences in the systemboards for a Proliant 2500 E24 (the PPro system board) and the E50 board (the PII board). Not only would those BIOS chips not work, but they would *really* not work (I'm not sure what that means...) The odd performance stemming from running NTPrime on both CPU's is a direct result of the memory architecture not being optimized for PII accesses and speeds. The E24 board was made to work great at handling mem requests for a pair of PPro's. Compaq does a GREAT job at SMP architecture, even on their older boards, using their custom chipsets and all that (much better than off-the-shelf dual CPU boards). However, when you go beyond what the motherboard was designed for, the peak performance of the mem architecture goes away. I would say that the BEST option you could come up with would be to forget the PII Overdrive chips (they're almost worthless, in my opinion, performing worse than a regular PII at the same speed... go figure. It shouldn't be that way, but that's my experience... The thing to do is to get the PPro-Celeron socket adapter from Powerleap (www.powerleap.com). They're compatible with the Proliant 2500 (and a few other dual PPro machines)... One caveat... you can get 2 upgrades for your 2500, but due to some physical constraints, some people have been forced to shave off a few millimeters of PCB to get both CPU's working in the 2500... but it can be done. Another caveat... only the older Celeron 550's are dual CPU capable... the newer ones are now missing that capability altogether. Powerleap sells kits of 2 Celeron 550's that are SMP capable, so that's one way to go. Another way to go is to forego the dual CPU and just get the fastest single Celeron they support, which is a Celeron 766MHz (the fastest 66MHz Celeron there is). Given the trade-offs of running dual 550's or a single 766, you might get better performance with the single, faster CPU than with 2 slower ones... only some benchmarks of either would really tell you though. Hmmm... I'm currently debating which way to go on that for the 2 Proliant 2500's I currently run. I'm leaning towards the single faster option for my own machine, which doesn't really need dual CPU's for much, and getting the dual 550's for the server at work since it does more things. Hey, that way I can tell you all which works better at NTPrime. :) To sum up: ... E24 boards don't work with E50 BIOS (there's actual physical differences in the board, which should be obvious since one is socket 8 and one is Slot 1. :) ... PL-Pro/II upgrades using Celeron (cache runs at full speed!) are a MUCH MUCH better option than the cheesy PII Overdrives (if you can even find one of those dinosaurs) ... Besides NTPrime, judge whether dual Celeron's at 550 would be better or worse than a single Celeron at 766. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: [Fwd: Re: Mersenne: Distributed Computing Mandatory For Juno's Free Users]
As another point, I know many who are in SETI solely for the nice graphical display. I don't know whether GIMPS, given the abstract nature of the work we do, could ever really develop such a display. I imagine a better GIMPS graphical display would look like part of the set from "twelve monkeys" with fake big black dials and twitching needles, that indicate system performance and available swap space and so forth. It could be a cute graphical system monitor application. Of course you can maximize your prime95 window. Hmm... not all that interesting to most folks... perhaps just have Prime95 update some SNMP counters... I think it'd be "neato" to use MRTG to track various counters of the machines I have running Prime95/NTPrime. Then you're just offloading the task of doing charts and stuff to some other machine. Doesn't really address the issue of having it show some cool stuff locally, although someone could write a screen saver that takes those counters and does something with it on the client itself. Also has the nice benefit of keeping the task of groovy displays out of the code of the program, and lets others write their own "plug ins" in any way they want. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Juno Warning [Somewhat OT]
tem/system32 area. FWIW, Windows XP is making great strides in trying to normalize behaviour such as this and actually does some fancy footwork on the sly to eliminate even more reboots by even the naughtiest installation routines. Win2K already does a good job of preventing DLL Hell, Windows XP does even better. So hey, at least Microsoft is paying a little bit of attention... Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: PrimeNet vulnerable to client misconfiguration?
There should, at the least, be some "anti-whammy" protection against the
same machine requesting more #'s than it could reasonably handle in a
certain time period (2 years is more than generous, I'd think).
We've seen this before, have we not? Misconfigured scripts of some sort
which keep retrieving new exponents while deleting the ones it already
got. I just recall a few times when some machines like that were
sucking the pool dry.
Aaron
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:mersenne-invalid-
[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Nathan Russell
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 8:25 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mersenne: PrimeNet vulnerable to client misconfiguration?
I just checked the PrimeNet status page out of curiousity, to find
that only two 10M-digit numbers are available. When I looked at the
work completed figures, it became rather obvious that one particular
user is running machines that are severely misconfigured. I don't
think this is deliberate abuse, since the user does have several
machines running a few dozen exponents with nothing apparently wrong
with them.
However, the sheer number of assignments involved speaks for itself.
yeager {~} cat status.txt | grep netconx | wc -l
2292
What I can't help wondering is whether GIMPS should have some
restriction on how many assignments can be checked out by a given
machine per unit time - in this case, the assignments in question are
being run by only two machines, which appear to be repeatedly losing
track of the work assigned to them. One likely possibility is some
sort of automated program that is repeatedly deleting or blanking the
worktodo.ini file.
Perhaps there should be hard limit, after which the user is given an
error or sent an email telling them of the situation?
In this case, there are enough exponents involved to take a top-end
system multiple centuries to complete, and there's no reason why that
should happen without someone contacting PrimeNet to make special
arrangments, if for no other reason than to always have work available
for everyone.
_
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RE: Mersenne: GIMPS: App error and dial-up
I am using a dial-up connection on an NT 4.0 machine, but I wasn't connected to the Internet and my Prime95 client wanted to connect. Prime95 said it would "try again in 60 minutes". I rebooted my machine (for whatever reason) and when the OS finally loaded I started Prime95. I got an app error (couldn't access memory location 0x0018). I kept getting this app error until I connected to the internet (to report this bug ironically) and Prime95 reported info to the server. Now it works OK again. Is this a known problem? If not, I can give more info on my system and what I did to re-create that problem. I seem to recall seeing this when the RPC dll was being used rather than HTTP. Some machines I had weren't connected to a hub sometimes, and apparently when rpc would try to contact the networking services, prime95 would crash with an error like that. Switching to HTTP fixed it since the HTTP dll must be better at detecting "no network" conditions and can abort gracefully. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.exu.ilstu.edu/mersenne/faq-mers.txt
RE: Mersenne: errors
O.K. its only a Cyrix 333...does this invalidate results? Should I switch to SETI? :) BTW it took me 9 months to do 9763841 LL!!! The Cyrix probably has the worst FPU of any x86 clone... I had a Cyrix 300 running and I quickly realized that it's good for factoring and that was about it. I've also got a couple AMD K6 400's that are similarly pokey. They could do a double-check of around M(5M) in reasonable time, but I put them on factoring because that's just what those processors can best be doing. Now...my Pentium III 600's are kicking butt at LL testing... It's all a matter of finding the right work for the CPU you have. If all you can do is factoring with a certain system, hey, factoring is fun too! Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: time needed for factoring
Henk Stokhorst wrote: L.S., Just curious, what makes factoring 13.388.659 take four times as long as 13.375.793? It's because 13,388,659 is past the cutoff of 13,380,000 where Prime95 starts factoring to the depth of 2^65 instead of 2^64. Normally, increasing the depth by a factor of one only doubles the time required. However, because of the nature of chip architecture, it takes a longer period of time than normal above 2^62 and again above 2^64 to do the necessary calculations (more instructions and such). Now, I may be totally off base here, but... The reason is because the integer part of the Intel CPU is 64 bit...okay, so Prime95 does some additional steps to provide greater bit depth factoring... Now, if that's really the case, would it be of any advantage to have the FPU handle factoring? I know that some processors only do factoring because they have a slow FPU to begin with (like Cyrix and AMD K6 chips), but would a Pentium be able to use it's FPU to do trial-factoring to greater bit depths any faster than the software based solution George uses beyond 64 bits? Just curious... Better yet, do any of the wacky SIMD/MMX/3DNow instructions provide any possible benefits for trial factoring? I recall a discussion before about how those instructions wouldn't be too useful for LL testing because of they only handle double-word sized data (32 bits), but for trial-factoring...any uses? Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Prime95 pour Win9x
The new version of Prime95 pop up every time Windows is restarted. So the users of my network don't like it any more. :-( Is that could be changed ? Either install using Prime95.zip (as it used to be done - the file is updated) or remove the shortcut to Prime95 from Startup folder after running P95Setup.exe. I think it's irritating to add shortcuts to the startup folder without asking the user. So the setup program does that for you irregardless of whether it was setup previously to start as a Win95 "service"? Bummer... I forgot who wrote that setup program, but basically you should have it look in the "run" key in the registry to see if it's already in there before you go and add it to the startup group. I've been tempted to write a better looking installer for Prime95 and also do one for NTPrime as well, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Just using either SMS Installer or WISE 8 (basically the same darn thing). Would anyone out there appreciate an automated install of the NTPrime thing? Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: M(M(19))
If there are an infinite number on Mersenne Primes, then by the "infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters" theory, M(M(19)) could actually contain a complete copy of the code for the "I Love You" virus. This would explain all Brian and Henrik's resent posts, AND the hard disk resonance problems. Um, this is quite improbible given that M(M(19)) is quite finite in size - almost certainly less than a quarter of the size of the number you're testing - , and, like any Mersenne number, is a repunit. And given the odds for random generation of even a short thing like the virus code, it's statistically impossible. Maybe when we get around to testing M(M(M(M(M(M(19)) :) Even a small protein has precious little chance for random assemblage...given that there are as few as 20 different amino acids involved, and they all need to be left-handed. :) Forgive me, I just checked my inbox and had 47 new mails - I thought one might have been a job offer (damn) ! Yeah, that gets annoying - I've been looking for a job for the better part of a year myself. I was just in Seattle last week...spur of the moment, I decided to look for a job there and in the first day, I had an interview with a head hunter, and by the end of the week I was interviewing for a company and it looks promising. I suppose job hunting is like the resteraunt business...success depends on 3 things: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. :) FWIW, Denver has a booming job market too. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Just curious
All this talk about PC's running 24/7 has convinced me of the reliability of processors. It's been my thoughts that if your computer is on, it's always running at full speed, whether or not you're running Prime95. I've always left my computers on all the time, and never had a problem. This reliability got me thinking about any other appliances that have the same level of reliability. I've had many machines running NTPrime for years now... Sometimes those NT servers are so rock solid they'll run for months at a time between reboots and I've had nary a problem. For example, I remember reading an article about light bulbs which said that if you leave a light bulb on continuously, it will last much longer due to the fact that the the filament doesn't contract when it gets cold. That's true...but only as far as total number of hours of life. There's a reason that light bulbs almost always burn out right when you turn them on...only VERY rarely will they burn out while already on. Just that having a cold filament which suddenly gets really hot...it can put alot of stress on that poor thing... But of course, you're much better off turning on a light when you need it because *you* will get more use out of it that way than if you just left your lights on all day, all night, all the time. :) I mean, you might get the full 3000 hours out of a bulb if you left it on all the time...but that's only 125 days. Now...take that same bulb and then think that you maybe turn it off and on 3-4 times a day for a grand total of maybe 5 hours a day. Okay... 5 hours a day would normally be 600 days, but the cycling of it will probably reduce it's life by nearly half, but you still get 300 days worth of use out of it. Okay, so I'm definitely over analyzing it... Of course, alot of people leave their computers on all the time because they're not as fast as a light bulb when it comes to turning it on (not usually anyway)... And some businesses need to leave them on all the time for doing software distributions during off hours. So, with that being said, you gotta figure hey...we're wasting all that electricity anyway, let's at least *do* something with it! Sigh...even if a company used the Prime95 time of day stuff to only let it run during certain hours, that'd be a big plus...oh well. I don't suppose George could just program something into the code to have it check for the user being idle (like the screen saver check does, but independent of the system screen saver routines) such that if the user doesn't hit a key or move the mouse for xx minutes, it would begin it's calculations (still at whatever priority you set it to...idle by default), but when the user is hitting keys or moving the mouse, it'll stop calculations altogether? That may allay the (unfounded) fears of some that Prime95 somehow steals cycles from other running programs. Just some thoughts... Oh, and while I'm at it...running Prime95 does put a heavier load on a CPU than if you just let it sit there doing nothing while powered on...merely because the FPU is churning away whereas normally it doesn't do much. That'll increase the heat output some, draw a bit more power... But the CPU's are made to take it, so might as well. And, like we've all been saying, we've had CPU's running Prime95 for years straight with no ill effects. From my US WEST experience on a nice sample of thousands of machines, I saw that if a CPU was bad at all, it would show up as errors in the prime.log within an hour. If it could make it past that, that CPU is good! :) Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Just curious
Hard disk drives seem to last much longer if they're left running continously. I'd reccomend disabling "power saving" modes on HDD unless power consumption is critical (e.g. a notebook computer when running on internal power). However, HDDs often fail if they've been running continously for years, then switched off left off long enough to cool right down. I think the heads get "glued" to the platters. The best advice for HDDs which must be turned off is to turn off, wait for 2 mins, turn on, wait for 10 mins, turn off, wait for 10 mins, turn on, wait for 2 mins finally turn off. The idea is to dissipate the "glue" which accumulates with constant use. For what it's worth... I've heard that referred to as "stiction" :) There's a decent enough solution to the problem of "stuck" drive heads, but you really should be absolutely sure that's what the problem is... Drives have a "landing zone" or parking area where the heads will move to when it's powered down. There's no data on that part of the track, so if your heads do get stuck there when it's turned off, there's something you can try... Again, be sure that's really what the problem is before trying this... :) But, in short, with the drive powered on and making the "hey, my heads are stuck!" noise, you gently rap the drive on a hard surface. Rap it harder and harder until finally you hear the heads moving about normally. Usually, the head will unstick itself and as long as the head wasn't actually damaged, you may have just enough time to get your data backed up pronto. Jeremy and I used to do that alot on those first generation IDE drives (which seemed to have this problem much more often) back when we were computer techs... It sounds funny, I know, but it worked great most of the time. For what it's worth, modern drives rarely have this problem. Even the 10,000 RPM drives which get QUITE hot during use have good landing zone areas where the heads aren't likely to come into contact with the hot platters. Power supply units seem to have a life which is governed primarily by the number of times they're turned on off. I've never heard of one failing in service whilst being fed a clean mains supply, but, given a mains glitch, it's common to have to replace a proportion of PSUs. (Like light bulbs, they seem to fail at the instant power is applied) For power supplies, having a decent UPS or even just a good line conditioner is a MUST when you want to prolong it's life. Anyone who cared to could hook an scope to a power line (make sure the scope is protected from overvoltage! :) and if it's a nice digital scope, you can see the surges and sags that happen *all the time*. Of course, not many folks have digital scopes... But a decent UPS does it's own logging...the APC Smart-UPS for instance. It'll keep track of the peaks and valleys through the day and it really is amazing what your poor little power supply has to deal with all the time. Sags can be just as damaging to your supply as a spike, by the way. I find the commonest failure in PC systems is _cooling fans_. Like HDDs it seems to be the case that the bearing will "glue up" if an always-running fan is switched off left to cool right off. Sometimes this makes them very noisy for a few minutes when power is restored, sometimes they just plain fail. Broken cooling fans are definitely very bad for the reliability of PC systems! I'll second that. Good servers (compaq servers for instance) monitor temps at key points and actually have redundant, hot swappable cooling fans. Gotta love that stuff. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Just curious
Jeremy and I used to do that alot on those first generation IDE drives (which seemed to have this problem much more often) back when we were computer techs... It sounds funny, I know, but it worked great most of the time. If I remember correctly, it seemed to happen with certain batches of drivers. Like a batch of WD drivers and then later maybe Maxtor or whatever. And there was *always* the same problem in that it would spin up and then right back down again at boot (usually the first boot). So I think it was more of a shipping or drive problem or something more than anything. But, as a last ditch effort it works... That was a different problem. That's where WD threatened to sue me and my company when I discovered a LARGE batch of their drives were having failure rates of nearly 80%. When I got on the newsgroups to see if others had the same problem, I found some other cases with those same drives, so I mentioned my problem of 80% and up failure rates... Well, WD apparently monitors the newsgroups and they contacted me and threatened me and the company I worked for with a libel suit. Geez. Of course once they got our bad drives back and examined them, sure enough, that's when they discovered a problem in their manufacturing that was leaving silica deposits all over inside the sealed case...the flakes would be whizzing around inside the drive like little asteroids, tearing the heads and platters to shreds basically. So in the end, they did find out that it was a manufacturing problem and I never heard an apology from them for threating me like that. :( Hmph...I've never bought a WD drive since and always tell people to avoid them. :) They did fix the problems with their drives, but in their initial period of denial, they refused to swap out the drives until they actually failed and I had about 30 screaming programmers I was supporting who didn't understand that WD was refusing to proactively replace the drives that hadn't yet failed. They didn't understand why we had to wait for them to lose all their data before we could replace them, and frankly, they were worried because they'd seen all the other drives of the other programmers that *had* already died and who lost all their data. So, thanks a lot WD! :-P In reality tho, I think that what is *more* common is the actual controller or PCB on the drive starts to flake out before an actual problem w/ the platters etc. Usually, if it is a platter/head problem its usually due to abuse (such as dropping something heavy on your drive while its reading/writing). At the risk of going too off topic, I do recall that in some cases we were able to recover data by taking the controller board from another drive of the same make/model and mounting it on the failed drive. If we were lucky, it *was* just the old board that had flaked out and we could still recover the data. I'll never forget the times when we would do data recovery of a bad drive by putting it in the freezer for 30 mins, which we *theorized* shrank the PCB on the HD thus fixing some stress fracture or whatever temporarily (long enough to get the data off the drive before it heated back up again). You know bro, we were the data recovery pros there! :) Well, it all goes to show you all that you're FAR more likely to have something besides the CPU die first, so you can just run Prime95 to your hearts content... just make sure you backup the files because chances are, your drive will go first. :) Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: mprime on a Dell PowerEdge
yeah, ugh. Well, the system came with 256MB of PC133 ECC registered SDRAM (2 * 128MB), I've fortified it with an additional 1GB of PC133 ECC registered SDRAM (4 * 256MB). I would *hope* any memory error would trip a ECC error. Tomorrow, I might pull the 1GB out and leave just the original 256MB to see what happens... Lets see whether a single instance runs all night... If it does, then I'm gonna have to suspect a cache coherency problem which is likely architectural, ugh. This machine uses the ServerWorks III LE chipset (formerly Reliance Computer Corporation, they make high end SMP server chipsets for Compaq, Dell, HP, SuperMicro and others). Well, that'd be a shame if it was architectural. I had a chance to test out a Poweredge last year...just a quad PIII Xeon though, before the new chips were out. It performed admirably under NT and running 4 instances of NTPrime. I must say though, the Compaq 4 way "blew" it away (well, by a few percentage points) when running multiple instances on each CPU. I recently got some info on Compaq's new Proliant servers that'll be using the new CPU's... I'm under NDA, so I'm not 100% sure what info is already public and what isn't. :( I'm sure I can at least say that the new machines use the latest Xeon's, run at 133MHz FSB, use Compaq's own architecture, as always. They're avoiding the Intel chipset, and the Compaq rep had some funny stuff to say about Intel's chipsets... They have the latest 64 bit/66 MHz PCI slots, etc. etc. etc. Looking really good. I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one of the 8-way Proliant 8000/8500 boxes. With 4 CPU's and about 1GB or so, they're a steal at about $42,000...probably less through the other vendors. Let's see...what else...they'll support a lot more memory, 8 or 16GB I seem to recall... Of course, you'd need Windows 2000 to support that much. Anyway, expected release dates for those nice little boxes are from this month out to June for all the different models. Basically, they're revamping the entire Proliant (and workstation) lines to include support for 133MHz FSB and all the new chips. And what with the 820 and 840 chipsets being somewhat lousy, it's nice having Compaq's own stuff on there, so you get real SDRAM support and all the other goodies. Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: GIMPS in Science News
I do wonder whether /any/ people can really appreciate the size of numbers with the magnitude of the Mersenne primes. Running down the list of known ones: (? signifies that I'm not sure how to represent the number) I don't recall the details, but one nice example I heard to demonstrate large probabilities was: Imagine you have a little bulldozer (atomic sized of course :) (assume hydrogen atoms since they be the smallest) This little bulldozer is tasked with moving a universe sized # of atoms from one side of a universe width to the other. It can only move one atomic width each year while pushing each atom, and then must move one atomic width each year on the way back to pick up the next one. The number of years it would take to move those atoms is, as you might guess, the really big number being conceptualized. Now...what I don't recall off the top of my head are (a) what's the estimate for the number of atoms in the universe, (b) about what is the estimated radius of the universe (if it's spherical at all, which, by big bang standards, it should approximate), and (c) what's the width of a hydrogen atom. Perhaps if I'm feeling up to it, I'll find which book I read this example in. It probably doesn't bear mentioning that I read this stuff in a book on the odds of abiogenesis occurring. :) So just ignore that aspect. Probably in Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" or Sproul's "Not a Chance" Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: GIMPS in Science News
Sorry to be slow with this - I'm behind in my reading. GIMPS was mentioned favorably in an article in the 4 March 2000 issue of "Science News" under the title "Great Computations." It includes commentary on a variety of distributed computing projects, and in addition to GIMPS it mentions George's software, our recent prime discoveries, Scott's Entropia.com, and even some contrite advice from Aaron. The entire article is presently online at http://www.sciencenews.org/2304/bob1.asp. Thought you'all might be interested in the coverage. I actually meant to forward this info on a long time ago. :) Ivars actually wrote me a while back and asked me if I had any comments I'd want to include, so that's where my statements come from. I just can't stress enough the importance of asking permission. At my current job, I manage the SMS stuff for our huge network. Out of curiousity, I ran a query to see if anyone had prime95.exe or ntprime.exe. Nope...none. Then I did a search for [EMAIL PROTECTED] and found a bunch... Sigh... I wonder what I'd find if I did a search for the distributed.net client executables? Hmm... But, this just goes to show that in any company of a certain size, you will have people who install their own software onto their PC's. Well, my case was just a matter of degree, but still, the principle is the same: if the machine isn't yours, ask permission first. Aaron PS - the article was incorrect in stating that I was arrested...I was never actually arrested. :) Just wanted to clarify that. :) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: GIMPS in Science News
I hope this doesn't start /another/ onlist flamewar... (sigh) I doubt that would happen on here...the people on this list are all a part of GIMPS, presumably. Well, except for the FBI and US WEST folks who monitor my posts. :) So I think it's safe to say that you're just preaching to the choir here. I wonder if telling them about the possibility of finding hardware errors would help. If we can each get all our friends to run one 5-30 day double-check each, it'll make a huge difference. For what it's worth, one interesting side effect of me running the client on all those US WEST machines was that I found a few machines during my look at the logfiles of them that had failed with some bad hardware errors. I made notes of the machines that had problems like that and removed the client from them...I actually intended to open up service tickets on those machines, but the US WEST security folks got to me first. :( I mentioned the bad machines to them during my "interrogation", but they didn't seem too interested in that more benevolent aspect. Some of these people had downloaded the seti client and run it for a while but didn't seem to be impressed by its performance or results. I'm much more excited about gimps, and believe that I am much more likely to find a certain Mersenne prime than evidence about extra-terrestrial life (which would still only be a speculation even so). Curiously, some of the SETI clients I found on our network here were older 1.x clients which, apparently, will not get any new work assignments. I'm sure these people just installed it on a whim and forgot about it... I don't know much at all about SETI@Home (I had to download the client and peek inside the CAB files just to see what the executable name of it was), so I may be wrong about that 1.x assumption...but that's what the readme seemed to say. And the whole thing about people faking work results on SETI...sigh...that's just so sad... I'm sure it's things like that which force them to send duplicate data sets to people. At least with GIMPS, we already do double-checks anyway, just as standard due diligence. And the "security" CRC or whatever that George puts into his compiled code for the results has been there for some time, correct? Well, I've said before that the odds of finding ET are very small, given the odds that any exist at all. But that point aside, I personally find it more stimulating to use my spare computer's time for a cause with more tangible results. Just my $0.02 worth. :) Aaron _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
