On 29 Jul 99, at 3:03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I hope they're at least running P166s by now.
Well, I'm still running a trio of P100s, as well as a quintet of
PIIs. They're a damn sight better than nothing; running a LL test on
an exponent in the 8 million range would be painful, but not half as
painful as testing a 10 million digit number on a PIII-500!
(Exclamation, not 500 factorial ;-)
> Any word on if Mr. Woltman
> will be coding a Merced version of Prime95?
Intel will have to release the Merced architecture documentation to
developers, and George will have to beg, borrow, steal or maybe even
buy a set of the documentation, and some Merced hardware to practise
on.
> Billiard? Hee hee hee.
Yup, I'm British, the only "billiards" I know is a game played with
two white & one red ball on a "billiards" table (like a large pool
table - interesting enough, it's still called a billiards table, even
when snooker is played on it). American cultural "pollution" has
wiped out the old meaning of "billion" i.e. 10^12, everyone here uses
"billion" meaning 10^9.
> <<(The EFF's big money appears to be safe!)>>
>
> Any projections on when we'll find a teraprime? *grin*
>
> S. "I want me a Merced!" L.
You'll _need_ a Merced, or at least an Alpha - even if someone
manages to speed up the algorithm enough to make starting the
computation worthwhile. Suppose we could get away with storing just
one copy of the work vector - that's > 3.3E12 bits, or 400 GBytes of
memory. Even if you could afford that much RAM, IA32 has only a 4GB
virtual address space.
If no-one improves the algorithm, then I'd _expect_ finding a
teraprime to take about 10^9 times as long as finding a gigaprime.
There are (obviously) 1000 times as many iterations to do, each
iteration will take (a bit more than) 1000 times as long to execute,
and the chance that a single exponent will prove to generate a
Mersenne prime is only 1/1000 as much.
10^9 is about 2^30, so I'd suggest a timeframe estimate of 30 Moore's
Law periods between finding the first gigaprime and finding the first
teraprime. So, something of the order of half a century, assuming
(and it's a _big_ assumption - the laws of physics are hard to work
around) that we really can continue to double speed every 18 to 24
months.
I'm 46 now; I expect to live long enough to see a gigaprime (and
maybe even a 13th human being's footstep on the Moon!), but I very
much doubt I will see a teraprime in my lifetime, unless there is a
major, major advance in the theory.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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