Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 18:21:22 -0700 (PDT) From: garyh@agora.rdrop.com (Gary Hanson) To: kline@tera.com (Gary Kline) Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD and Mersenne Primes Message-ID: <m0um8va-0008vbC@agora.rdrop.com> In-Reply-To: <199608012253.PAA24608@athena.tera.com> from "Gary Kline" at Aug 1, 96 03:53:08 pm
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[Followups moved to chat.] > > BTW, the app is George Woltman's mersenne-prime search program, and > > it'd be nice to have some BSD systems using spare cycles to look for > > the largest prime number in the world. :-) > If we could do this, if someone could spare his system for > a few months [[ ??? ]] finding a new mersenne prime would > cause major excitement. 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 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
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