Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 11:17:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Gary Kline <kline@tera.com> To: garyh@agora.rdrop.com (Gary Hanson) Cc: kline@tera.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Mersenne Primes Message-ID: <199608021817.LAA26428@athena.tera.com> In-Reply-To: <m0um8va-0008vbC@agora.rdrop.com> from Gary Hanson at "Aug 1, 96 06:21:22 pm"
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According to Gary Hanson: > [Followups moved to chat.] > [[ (chat): good! ]] > > Yup, but you don't have to dedicate a system to it; see below. > > > The last mersenne prime that I know of beind discovered was > > done by Dave Slowinski at Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, WI. > > Yes, but there's another (smaller) one that's currently being verified. > > For full details on "The GREAT Internet Mersenne Prime Search," try: > > http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/justforfun/prime.htm I'm checking it out, thanks for the pointer. > > George Woltman has organized a group of people to search for Mersenne > primes, and has written a very highly optimized program to do the work. > Currently, over 290 people and 300 machines are searching. The core of > the program is in assembler, and basically does fft's very fast. He has > Pentium-optimzed versions of his program for WinNT, Win95, Win31(?) and > Linux elf. The idea is to run the program in the backround, at the > lowest possible priority, so that it'll only use otherwise idle cycles. > I'd written to George to ask about doing a FreeBSD native port, but ran > into elf-related stumbling blocks. It would be great for FreeBSD to have > a native version, but neither George nor I can do that ourselves. > > BTW, I joined the hunt about two months ago, and my home system is > currently searching using Win95. Just about the only time I ran FreeBSD > at home recently was when I installed the "Special Collector's Edition" > of 2.1.5 at the time of its' initial release. I'd really rather be running > BSD while searching, rather than 95. :-( > > > --Gary Hanson > This sound like great fun as well as being a good challenge for the teckkies among us. I guess it would be asking a bit much for a P5 to go up against an XMP (or whatever it was that Slowinski used). When you've finished the port, please let me know... Or the entire list. gary <><> "Fornicate and take drugs against the terrible strain of idiots who govern the world." -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology
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