At 08:41 AM 1999/04/10 -0600, "Aaron Blosser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>George...is it too late to request features for the new version?
>
>I had done some thinking on it, and wouldn't it be great if there were some
>sort of "live update" feature, where it could upgrade itself when new
>versions come out. That's pie in the sky and I remember discussing
>previously how that wouldn't work for everyone - security issues, bandwidth
>issues, etc. but perhaps if it were an option.
This feature would have meant that V17 shift count bug would have cost
the project more cpu years than it did. In my case, its impact is a
little under 1 cpu year (one exponent in the 10.5M area) because most
processors I'm running were at older versions.
There is a publicly available service which checks for changes in web pages,
and sends email when a checked page changes. I think Internet Explorer
V5 supports some sort of favorite-page-change detection too.
This combined with being able to remotely stop an NT service and deposit
updated files from a batch procedure on one workstation makes managing
large numbers of workstations practical and quick.
>At the very least, I think that there should be an "alert" or other
>notification of some sort when a new version comes out, rather than relying
>on emails being sent. The problems with version 17 should give a good
>example of how that would help. A problem is found with a version, or
>simply a new faster version is out, so the next time Prime contacts
>Primenet, it sees some flag set and pops up a box on the screen telling the
>user about the new version. And a seperate option for how often to check
>for "messages" besides the number of days between checking in at primenet to
>update expected completion dates.
I would find a popup box a terrible nuisance, so I'd like an option
to turn it off or on, with default off.
The feature I'd like to see at some point is the LLtest code made dual-cpu
aware, splitting the load so one cpu does one half of the run-length and
the other cpu does the other half, so that the onboard and on-chip caches
would be more efficiently used, and total working set smaller, and exponents
completed more quickly. I have a dual-pentium 200 MMX that isn't terribly
fast when running two prime95 instances on exponents above 10^7. The
performance on the dual-pentium or dual-ppro systems I have access to is,
when running two instances, about 1.6 times that of running 1 instance.
So there is some room for improvement. On this setup, there are 2 L1 caches,
but one L2 cache being shared by two prime95 instances.
Ken
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