On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 19:24, John R Pierce wrote: > >I was given an old DEC AlphaServer. It has a 64-bit Alpha chip. The > > machine is running Windows NT 4 Server. Because the chipset is Alpha > > and NOT Intel, regular Windows executables won't run on it. > > > > I'd love to use the power of this 64-bit AlphaServer to find the next > > Mersenne prime. I have had some problems getting flavors of Linux and > > Unix to run on this box. This is why I've gone back to the original OS > > of this server. > > > > I am asking that the latest GIMPS client be ported to run on my DEC > > AlphaServer running Windows NT 4 Server. > > The x86 version of GIMPS is heavily optimized with assembly code that has > been highly tuned to the Pentium-II/-III FPU pipeline, as well as the the > SSE SIMD operations of the P4. This task took many 1000s of man hours > spread over a period of years by the project creator, George Woltman, and > was only justifiable by the very large number of x86 systems out there. > > The 'generic' version of mprime, with the Lucas Lehmer FFTs coded in C is > considerably less efficient, however, it shouldn't be that hard to tweak a > version of `mprime` to run as a alpha windows command line program, if you > have a C compiler for it. > > I'm curious what clock speed your Alphaserver runs at? I believe those > topped out at around 1Ghz, with most of them in the 200-600Mhz range, and > even with the Alpha's relatively high MFlop/Mhz ratio, they still can't > compete with todays $600 PCs running 3000MHz P4's. This would make it > rather hard to justify the porting effort for a single server.
I'm also curious, as I have a AlphaStation 250 4/266 which I acquired (for free!) with Tru64 installed. The machine is presently running Debian Linux and I had no problem whatsoever installing it. Paul _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
