Re: Mersenne: End of list

2004-04-23 Thread George Woltman
At 10:38 AM 4/23/2004 -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
say, who runs the DNS for mersenne.org ?
ok, the domain is registered to George Woltman...  so he'd have to contact 
sbsi-net to do this.
Contact Scott at [EMAIL PROTECTED]  He'll need to do whatever is required. 

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Re: Mersenne: End of list

2004-04-22 Thread George Woltman
At 11:30 AM 4/22/2004 -0700, Gordon Irlam wrote:
FYI.  I intend to end this list shortly.
Thank you, Gordon.  Your efforts have been greatly appreciated over the years!

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Re: Mersenne: Re: Where is M23494381?

2003-12-29 Thread George Woltman
At 10:48 AM 12/29/2003 +, Doug Feather wrote:
I've had the same experience with some exponents assigned to me.  My guess
is that someone has been doing trial factoring work semi-independent of
PrimeNet and has just reported all the work that they have done.
This is probably a good explanation - especially in light of your point #2

1. For a long time on this page:
http://mersenne.org/primenet/
there where no exponents in the range listed 21.9M to 22.0M.  This has
recently changed with them now all being listed as available for first time
Lucas Lemer testing.
These exponents were manually reserved a year and a half ago for some
trial factoring work.  Yesterday, I cancelled that reservation and added the
exponents to the server.
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Re: Mersenne: Single or Dual channel memory for P4

2003-12-26 Thread George Woltman
At 07:33 PM 12/26/2003 +, Brian J. Beesley wrote:
I'd expect that going dual
channel would give a very significant improvement in speed _for
mprime/prime95_ probably around 25%.
Ask for advice at www.mersenneforum.org.  I think I've read that
dual channel gives you around a 5% boost.
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Mersenne: 40th Mersenne Prime verified and word is getting out

2003-12-02 Thread George Woltman
Hi all,

Michael Shafer discovered the 40th known Mersenne prime, 2^20996011-1.
Congratulations Michael.  This prime is over 6.3 million digits, beating
the previous world record prime by over 2 million digits.
Scott has handed out the press release and already the first online article
of the discovery has appeared:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns4438

You can also read Scott's press release http://www.mersenne.org/20996011.htm

I'll try to add more links to the http://mersenne.org web page as they become
available.
Well done everyone,
George
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Mersenne: 40th Mersenne Prime found

2003-11-17 Thread George Woltman
As you may already know, a user has reported discovering the 40th known
Mersenne prime!
In the wake of the false prime report a few months ago, we added a few
failsafes to quickly detect a false report.  Fortunately, this user was 
using the
new version of prime95.  He emailed me the save file with 2000 iterations
remaining.  I reran those final iterations and my computer also reports this
number prime - in my mind eliminating any chance of a hardware error.

Unfortunately, we still must go through the official different machine, 
different
program verification which will probably end in early December.  So please be
patient awaiting the disclosure of the number.  Waiting for verification saved
us from a huge embarrassment last time!

Oh yes, hints.  I've always given hints.  The prime number is more than
five million digits and less than ten million digits.
Congratulations to all!!  GIMPS has done it again!

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Re: Mersenne: 50% CPU?

2003-11-03 Thread George Woltman
At 04:35 PM 11/3/2003 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
I don't know if the affinity stuff will work in linux, however..
Mprime ignores the affinity settings in the ini files.  We'll have to
add it when linux 2.6 is released. 

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Mersenne: Re: Linux

2003-11-02 Thread George Woltman
At 04:48 AM 11/2/2003 -0600, Michael Kilfoyle wrote:

George, et al: I have an old intel pentium pro server that i am converting 
to Linux.  Once i get it going and have learner enough to be dangerous on 
the is OS I wan to add the prime search tools.  Question is what version 
do i download.   What is the difference between Mprime & Sprime?  The 
support web page tends to mix the OS and the architecture.  SO for UNIX on 
SUN go one place for Intel go another place.   So this is Intel (Compaq 
5000 quad 200mhz pentium pro) and RedHat Linux.
mprime and sprime are the same program just linked differently.  Try mprime
first.  It uses less runtime memory (shares the C runtime library with other
running programs).  If that fails (I linked to one version of the C runtime
libraries, but you have an incompatible set of runtime libraries 
installed), then
try sprime.

Regards,
George
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Re: Mersenne: Version 23.4

2003-08-31 Thread George Woltman
At 09:55 AM 8/31/2003 -0400, Marcel van de Vusse wrote:
> More improvements for P4 owners! You can expect up to 9% faster iteration
> times compared to version 23.3! All users doing ECM should also upgrade to
> 23.4.
This message was from May. The web page still lists version 23 as being
beta. Does anybody have any idea when the final release of version 23
will be?
I think 23.6 will be the last of the version 23s.  I had hoped to make a 
few more
performance improvements for the x86 FFTs, but further improvements
require a lot of coding.

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Re: Mersenne: Should I switch an exponent to another processor type?

2003-07-26 Thread George Woltman
At 11:20 AM 7/26/2003 +0100, Doug Feather wrote:
  I've currently got an exponent of the order of 20.05M running on a P4
(1.8Mhz).  It has decided to run it with FFT size 1280K.  It's done just
over 1M iterations (and hasn't finished Stage 2 P-1 since this only runs for
a few hours each night).  If I'd of know that it was going to use this FFT
size before it started, it would have been better for me to switch it to
another processor type - since then it would have used a smaller FFT size.
If I now move the saved file to another processor type would it use a
smaller FFT size or is the FFT size hard coded into the save file or is this
a bad idea to move the saved file for other reasons?
I think you can move it to another machine without problem.  The FFT size
is encoded in the save file, but when the save file is opened prime95 checks
to see if a different FFT length should be used and converts if necessary.
The only downside to moving an exponent is that if *either* computer has
hardware problems, then your result could be corrupted.
You could also look in undoc.txt for options on making prime95 choose FFT
crossover points more aggressively.  Look in results.txt for info on how close
prime95 was to choosing the 1024K FFT length.  If it was a really close call
you could edit local.ini to make it choose the 1024k FFT length for that 
exponent.

While on the subject of FFT size where is the information stored about
which FFT size tests have been run on each machine?
This information is not recorded anywhere - my database does not care
which FFT length was used on each LL result.
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Re: Mersenne: version 23.5

2003-07-05 Thread George Woltman
At 10:40 PM 7/5/2003 +, Russel Brooks wrote:
> Speed improvements of 3 to 8% can be expected for Athlon, Duron, Pentium 3,
> and Celeron 2 owners.
Is this speed improvement for LL tests only or will I also see a
factoring improvement?
LL and P-1 factoring will be faster.  Trial factoring will be unchanged. 

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Re: Mersenne: Error 12002

2003-07-03 Thread George Woltman
At 12:47 PM 7/1/2003 -0800, Gordon Bower wrote:
Looking through the Forum archives it appears Error 12002 is a version
21-specific problem that occurs when entropia.com is down even if
mersenne.org is up. On Saturday entropia.com was indeed down. However,
entropia's website has been up since sometime Sunday, and I have *still*
been getting hourly 12002s on three different systems.
I would also ask the "keeper of the faq" to add a few new lines to it
about these "new" (since 2 years or so ago) error messages that aren't
described in the online information.
As suggested, I've added error 12002 to the FAQ.  I've also emailed Scott
to see if he can get Entropia to restart GIMPS message forwarding process  

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Mersenne: version 23.5

2003-07-03 Thread George Woltman
Version 23.5 is available.  See 
http://www.mersenneforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=3 for downloading links.  This
is a beta release, but should work OK.

Speed improvements of 3 to 8% can be expected for Athlon, Duron, Pentium 3, 
and Celeron 2 owners.

Four or five changes have been added to reduce the chance of another
false prime report.
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Mersenne: M997 factored

2003-06-22 Thread George Woltman
Bruce Dodson has found an incredible 57 digit factor of M997 using
prime95's ECM.  This is two digits longer than the previous longest factor
found using the ECM method.
Here's the output from prime95:

ECM found a factor in curve #14, stage #2
Sigma=6329517009540700, B1=4400, B2=429000.
UID: bd1024tmp, M997 has a factor:
167560816514084819488737767976263150405095191554732902607
Cofactor is a probable prime!
Congratulations to Bruce on this improbable discovery!

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Re: Mersenne: M#40 - what went wrong?

2003-06-16 Thread George Woltman
At 12:44 AM 6/17/2003 +, Elias Daher wrote:
no matter how quick this additional test will be, it will slow down all 
machines globally,
if we consider that this additional test takes only 3 minutes per exponent 
overall in average, ...
The test will take at most 300 clock cycles (the time to read a double from
main memory).  20,000,000 iterations * 300 clocks / 1 GHz cpu speed will 
add only 6 seconds to the average LL test.  This is 30 times better than 
your 3
minutes estimate.

I think adding 6 seconds or even 3 minutes per LL test will have negligible
impact on GIMPS throughput.  Your analysis is correct, but maybe there are
other small, unquantifiable factors at work.  How about the possible cost of
a second false alarm causing 3 people to drop out of GIMPS saying
"these guys are bozos that don't learn from their mistakes"?
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Re: Mersenne: M#40 - what went wrong?

2003-06-16 Thread George Woltman
At 05:08 PM 6/16/2003 -0400, Bill Daly wrote:

Occam's Razor suggests that the original report was faked. Until this 
possibility can be absolutely eliminated,
It can't be absolutely eliminated.  However, there are many indications
that this was not a hacking attempt.  The user has been at this 5 years.
His emails we're genuine.  He made no attempt at gaining publicity.
He's more my age (old) rather than the typical hacker age (young).
If this was a hacking attempt, why create a results.txt file showing 5 errors
during the run?
In the end, it doesn't really matter.  Even if this we're a hacking attempt,
tightening up the code to reduce the chance of a false positive is a good thing.
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Re: Mersenne: M#40 - what went wrong?

2003-06-16 Thread George Woltman
At 07:52 PM 6/15/2003 -0700, Luke Welsh wrote:
I'm fishing

What about +/- INF ?
Yes, they would be treated just like a NaN.  Prime95 checks if the sum
of the FFT inputs is NaN, or +/- INF every iteration (generating the common
ILLEGAL SUMOUT error).
What about corruption of any of the pre-computed arrays?
Yes, if the first weight value was NaN, then that would corrupt the entire
FFT data array.  Of course, this generates an ILLEGAL SUMOUT on
the next iteration, but if this single corruption happened during the
last iteration then a false positive would have been generated.
Version 23.5 will now detect this.

I'm also adding code to 23.5 to check EVERY iteration for an impossible result
such as -2, -1, 0, 1, 2.  This test will be very, very quick.
FYI, six times a result of 0002 has been reported to the
server.  So, somehow or another it is possible for a hardware error to
zero the FFT data without triggering an ILLEGAL SUMOUT.
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Mersenne: M#40 - what went wrong?

2003-06-13 Thread George Woltman
It was once thought that a false positive report "couldn't happen".  So what
went wrong?
So far I've come up with two possibilities.

1) The FFT data is zeroed AND does not go into the -2,2,2,2 loop.
I don't know how the data gets zeroed, but I've seen it happen. It has
happened a lot less often once code was added to reject any save file with
all zero data. The not going into the -2,2,2,2 loop can happen with the
corruption of a single local variable. I've just added code that makes sure
this local variable is always in the range 0 <= variable < exponent.
2) This case results from the way my C compiler treats floating point NaN.
NaN stands for not a number. If NaN is converted to an integer, the integer
is zero. So if the FFT data is all NaNs, prime95 will report a prime. Prime95
check for NaNs every iteration, but if every FFT data value becomes NaN
after the inverse FFT of the last LL iteration, then we get a false positive.
Furthermore, corrupting a single value (the initial carry input to rounding
and carry propogation code) could set every FFT data value to NaN.
I've fixed the code to make sure there are no NaNs in the final is-it-a-prime
check.
Which of the above is more likely? I don't know. It seems the first requires
two or more pieces of memory corrupted, but it leads to a steady state. So
the errors can occur at any point during the LL test. The second case requires
only one failure, but at a very specific point in time.
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Mersenne: M#40 verification runs completed

2003-06-13 Thread George Woltman
Hello all,

It is official - not prime.  Both Guillermo's Mlucas run and my prime95 run
return a matching non-zero residue.
We will never know what caused prime95 to generate a false
positive, I am studying the code for ways in which a memory corruption could
cause this.  Something good will come from this sorry ending.
I am confidant this incident will have little negative impact on GIMPS.  While
the episode was probably an unhappy roller-coaster ride for one individual,
the false positive problem is far less damaging to GIMPS than the version 17
shift bug disaster.
This incident illustrates why most other distributed projects keep any client
finds secret (even from the discoverer) until verified.  If we had a 
similar policy
this could have been swept under the rug and no one would ever have known.
I kind of like our policy though.  It lets everyone in on the ups and downs of
the project.

Thanks to Guillermo and Ernst for dedicating time to the verification run.

Best regards,
George
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Mersenne: Re: M#40 verification run

2003-06-11 Thread George Woltman
More bad news to report.  I've just gotten a hold of the results.txt file 
from the
original run.  There were five SUM(INPUTS) != SUM(OUTPUTS) error during
the run.  Historically, five errors during a run means there is less than a 50%
chance the final LL result will be correct.

Now I have to try and figure out what safety checks can be added to prevent
false alarms.
So far, I have 2 changes planned:

1)  Prime95 does not tell the server how many errors occurred for an LL test
with a prime result.  I'll fix this.  Knowing their were 5 errors would 
have raised
red flags earlier on.

2)  I'll change prime95 to NOT delete the save files when a new prime is found.
When a prime is reported, I'll ask for the save file and rerun the last 30 
minutes
of the test.  I think this would have helped in this case.  This measure also
deters a hacker.   It might be easy for a hacker to spoof a prime report - but
he'll have difficulty generating a save file that reports the number as 
prime after
the final 30 minutes of LL testing.

There is still a chance this really is prime, we'll know on Friday.



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Mersenne: M#40 verification run

2003-06-11 Thread George Woltman
I've tried to keep everyone promptly informed of Mersenne news - good or bad.
So, here we go...
My verification run of M#40 just completednot prime.   Now we wait for
Guillermo Ballester Valor's run to complete in the next few days. Our runs
matched at 13 million iterations.
Possibilities are:
1) The original run was flawed or there is a bug in the version of prime95 
used.
It is hard to imagine a bug or hardware glitch that generates an all zero 
LL result.
If memory is zeroed at some point, the next LL iterations are -2, 2, 2, 2, ...
2) My overclocked machine generated an undetected error or the prime95 version
I'm using has a bug that is affecting my result.
3) I was debugging an out-of-memory bug report last night. It is theoretically
possible there is an OS bug that affects other processes in these severe
circumstances.

I have save files every million iterations. If this really is a new 
Mersenne prime,
then I'll rerun the last iterations again to make sure the latest prime95 
does not have
a bug.

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Re: Mersenne: 40th Mersenne Prime Found (probably)!

2003-06-04 Thread George Woltman
At 09:59 PM 6/2/2003 -0700, Brian Dessent wrote:

Anyone want to submit this to e.g. slashdot?
I wouldn't do that until the exponent is officially announced.

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Re: Mersenne: 40th Mersenne Prime Found (probably)!

2003-06-03 Thread George Woltman
At 08:20 PM 6/1/2003 +0100, Daran wrote:
I presume you're doing an unofficial DC on it right now.  Can you give us
some idea when this will be complete?
I wasn't going to do one but Ernst has started his and suggests comparing
residues every 1,000,000 iterations.  A good idea, so I've just begun my test.
Ernst will finish his official test in the June 20-21 time frame.  I should 
finish
sometime on the 11th.

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Mersenne: 40th Mersenne Prime Found (probably)!

2003-06-02 Thread George Woltman
Hello all,

This morning a new Mersenne Prime was reported to the primenet server.
It will be the new largest known prime but is less than 10 million digits.
For those not familiar with the process regarding new prime discoveries,
here is what will happen.  The discovery will be verified using a
different program and different hardware.   The discoverer and the
exponent will be kept secret until verification is complete.  This is done for
two reasons:  1)  It reduces the incentive for a malicious user to hack
prime95 to report a bogus prime, and 2) It makes it easier to interest
a newspaper in reporting the find (they are breaking news rather than
reporting 2-week old information).
Congratulations to all!  New primes can't be found without the thousands
of unsuccessful tests contributed by everyone.
Enjoy,
George
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Re: Mersenne: servers down completely?

2003-03-23 Thread George Woltman
At 10:11 AM 3/23/2003 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
I can't even raise the mersenne website.  getting errors on entropia.com/ips
too, yet entropia.com's home page comes up fine.
I just heard from Brad Bernard at Entropia.  They are having major problems
with their ISP.  The T1 lines are down and may not be fixed until Monday.
They and I apologize for the problem but are at the mercy of the ISP.

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Re: Mersenne: Probability

2003-03-22 Thread George Woltman
At 01:35 AM 3/22/2003 -0500, The Pope Family wrote:
I just found 4 factors in a row from exponents randomly assigned by the
project.
So, what's the chance of finding factors using Prime 95's default
settings for four randomly assigned exponents in a row?
The chance of trial factoring finding a factor is about 13%.  The chance
for four in a row is 0.13^4 or about 0.03% chance.

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Re: Mersenne: P-1 on PIII or P4?

2003-03-11 Thread George Woltman
At 07:47 AM 3/11/2003 -0500, Richard Woods wrote:
However, any difference in FFT size between a P4 and other CPU, because
of SSE support/nonsupport, could make a difference to the algorithm
because it _does_ take FFT size into account.
There was a bug in calculating the the FFT size (bytes of memory consumed)
for the P4.   This bug caused the P-1 bounds selecting code to produce
different results than the x86 code.  This is a fairly benign bug and will be
fixed in version 23.3
In case you care, the details are:  There is a global variable called FFTLEN
that is used in many places and is initialized by the FFT init routine.  The
routine to select the P-1 bounds is called before the FFT code is initialized.
Thus, the routine to calculate the number of bytes consumed by an FFT
cannot use the global variable FFTLEN.   In fact, that routine is passed
an argument - fftlen in lower case.   Well, you guessed it, in the P4 section
of the routine I referenced FFTLEN rather than fftlen.   The routine worked
fine once the FFT code was initialized - only the P-1 bounds selecting code
was affected.
BTW, the FFT size is more than FFT length * sizeof (double).  There are
various paddings thrown in for better cache usage.  Sadly, if I had just
used "FFT length * sizeof (double)" as an estimate for the size in selecting
the P-1 bounds this bug never would have happened and the size estimate
is more than accurate enough for the purposes of selecting bounds.

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Re: Mersenne: P-1 on PIII or P4?

2003-03-10 Thread George Woltman
At 01:16 AM 3/11/2003 +, Daran wrote:
I don't think George's '1 or 2 extra temporaries' theory stands up.
Sure it does.  I fired up the debugger and the P4 has 5541 temporaries
and the x86 has 89 temporaries.
Hmmm, maybe I'd better look into it a little bit further

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Re: Mersenne: P-1 on PIII or P4?

2003-03-10 Thread George Woltman
At 09:05 PM 3/10/2003 +, Brian J. Beesley wrote:
On Monday 10 March 2003 07:49, Daran wrote:
> Or is there some
> reason I can't think of, why higher values might be appropriate for a P4?
George?

The Athlon system picked B1=105000, B2=1995000 whilst the P4 picked
B1=105000, B2=2126250. So it seems that P4 is picking a significantly but not
grossly higher B2 value.
I looked at the bounds picking code and there is no special action taken for
the P4.   The only place I can see a difference is in the calculation of number
of temporary variables.  The P4 FFT uses a denser memory layout than the
x86 FFT.  Thus you might get an extra temporary or two.  And you just
happened to hit a boundary condition where the extra temporary allowed P-1
to use a more efficient stage 2 implementation and consequently it pays to
run stage 2 a little longer.  Only running prime95 with the debugger on could
prove this theory.

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Mersenne: New record P-1 factor

2003-02-27 Thread George Woltman
Frank Hornung found the largest factor ever found using P-1.
M17504141 is divisible by the 45-digit factor
426315489966437174530195419710289226952407399
Paul Zimmermann maintains a list of P-1 records here:
http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/Pminus1.html

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Re: Mersenne: exponent reported not prime in 'results.txt', but not communicated to primenet.

2003-02-25 Thread George Woltman
At 10:48 PM 2/25/2003 +0100, george de fockert wrote:
Indeed, primenet knows nothing, and still assumes my machine is busy with
that exponent.
What to do now, enter it in 'worktodo.ini' manually ?
That is weird.  Email the result for 16519367 to me.

Regards,
George

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Re: Mersenne: Double-check assignment lost?

2003-02-23 Thread George Woltman
At 08:39 PM 2/22/2003 -0500, Walt Mankowski wrote:
So someone's poaching double-checks now?!
*Sigh*
> 8970673  65  D  0x45932E28306E98__21-Feb-03 19:10  S93724
> C4159C890
>
> Someone has done it. I don't know why.
It is highly unlikely that someone poached this exponent.  It is not near
a milestone and the exponent is not of any particular significance.
Most likely, either 1) you got a recycled exponent and the result was
belatedly reported,  or 2) someone operating manually and/or not
understanding how GIMPS works tested the exponent, or 3)  the server
glitched and handed it out twice, or even 4) the first time tester might
have tested it again for reasons unknown, or 5) some reason I haven't
thought of.
Sorry for your troubles,
George

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Mersenne: V23.2 - more P4 speed enhancments

2003-02-20 Thread George Woltman
Version 23.2 seems stable enough to use.   P4 owners should see a 4 to 6%
improvement in LL speed over version 23.1

My own P4 Northwood (512K L2 cache) benchmarks are:

V22.10  v23.1   V23.2
384K FFT17.123  16.801  15.845
448K FFT20.686  19.817  18.732
512K FFT23.347  22.669  21.693
640K FFT30.270  29.130  27.545
768K FFT37.036  35.847  33.829
896K FFT45.737  43.370  41.071
1024K FFT   49.389  47.776  44.949
1280K FFT   69.955  63.673  60.133
1536K FFT   85.890  77.668  73.334
1792K FFT   104.573 94.767  89.636

You can get the software at:
Windows: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v232.zip
Linux: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/mprime232.tar.gz
ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/sprime232.tar.gz
NT service: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/winnt232.zip

Let me know if you run into any problems.  Enjoy!


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Mersenne: Re: New LL thresholds

2003-02-13 Thread George Woltman
At 11:12 AM 2/13/2003 +, Robin Stevens wrote:

Out of interest, where's the threshold for factoring/double checks these
days?


In v23, I left the factoring/double-checking boundary at a 233 MHz Pentium.


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Mersenne: "Small" exponents for first time testing

2003-02-10 Thread George Woltman
I'm releasing about 500 exponents below 15,000,000 for first time testing.
These were originally reserved manually in 2001 but results have not been
sent in.

So for those that like to fine-tune their work, get 'em while the getting 
is good.
Please keep hoarding to a minimum!

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Mersenne: Version 23.1 Linux and NT service

2003-02-10 Thread George Woltman
As requested, the other easy ports of v23.1 are now available:

Windows: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v231.zip
Linux: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/mprime231.tar.gz
ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/sprime231.tar.gz
NT service: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/winnt231.zip

P.S.  When comparing benchmarks between v22 and v23 be aware that
the two versions time different FFT ranges, so make sure you look at the
FFT size on each output line rather than simply comparing the first, second,
third, etc. output lines.


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Mersenne: version 23.1 timings

2003-02-09 Thread George Woltman
In case you are interested here are the before and after benchmarks for
my own P4 Northwood:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz
CPU speed: 2311.52 MHz
L2 cache size: 512 KB
Prime95 version 22.10, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 384K FFT length: 17.123 ms.
Best time for 448K FFT length: 20.686 ms.
Best time for 512K FFT length: 23.347 ms.
Best time for 640K FFT length: 30.270 ms.
Best time for 768K FFT length: 37.036 ms.
Best time for 896K FFT length: 45.737 ms.
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 49.389 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 69.955 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 85.890 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 104.573 ms.

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz
CPU speed: 2311.38 MHz
L2 cache size: 512 KB
Prime95 version 23.1, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 384K FFT length: 17.175 ms.
Best time for 448K FFT length: 20.320 ms.
Best time for 512K FFT length: 23.232 ms.
Best time for 640K FFT length: 29.986 ms.
Best time for 768K FFT length: 36.869 ms.
Best time for 896K FFT length: 44.585 ms.
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 48.950 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 65.557 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 80.381 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 98.204 ms.


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Mersenne: Prime95 version 23.1 - Pentium 4 improvements

2003-02-09 Thread George Woltman
Version 23.1 seems to be stable enough to use although its really still 
Beta software.
I've not run the full QA suite as I have more changes planned.  The Windows 
version
is available at ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v231.zip  If there is interest 
I'll make a Linux version available too.

Only P4 users need to download it. There are a number of small speed 
increases to the SSE2 code. The gains are greatest for P4 Celeron and P4 
Northwood CPUs.
The full text from whatsnew.txt:

1)  Big SSE2 FFTs now take the L2 cache size into account.  P4 Celeron (128KB
L2 cache) is faster for FFTs between 512K and 2M.  P4 Northwood (512KB
L2 cache) is faster for FFTs larger than 1M.
2)  Benchmark no longer times 256K and 320K FFTs, but does time 2048K FFT.
3)  Support for torture testing FFT sizes from 1280K to 4096K added.
4)  A 900 MHz P-III is now required to get first time LL tests by default.
5)  Slightly faster SSE2 FFTs for lengths of 5*2^N and 7*2^N (e.g. 640K, 896K).

One item missing from whatsnew.txt is prime95 now pages better, resulting in
improved times for several FFT sizes not listed above.  This came about from
noticing that the debug version was faster than the release version.  The debug
malloc filled memory with a constant, thus making it more likely to be 
allocated
in contiguous physical memory.  Since the FFTs are designed to fill the L2
cache evenly when the FFT data is in contiguous memory, there is a significant
speedup when the FFT code is using nearly all of the L2 cache.

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Mersenne: Double-checking milestone!

2003-02-03 Thread George Woltman
Congratulations GIMPSters,

Yesterday the last double-check below M(6972593) came in.  This proves
there are no undiscovered Mersenne primes below M(6972593) making it
the 38th Mersenne prime.

Thanks to everyone for all their hard work in making this milestone possible.

Keep on crunching and have fun,
George


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Re: Mersenne: An officially sanctioned poach....

2003-01-28 Thread George Woltman
At 10:02 AM 1/28/2003 -0800, you wrote:

Far be it from me to tell you that you are wrong, but that is not at all 
consistent with what I observe with my own exponents.  For instance, 
exponent 19373911 shows a 9 right now, it connected a short while ago and 
the machine is early in the 66 bit pass.  The percent complete is about to 
hit 12.5%, at which time I should be able to force a manual connect and 
then it will show a 10.  Yep, it now shows a 10.

I stand corrected.  I wonder is some older versions used to behave the buggy
way that I described.

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Re: Mersenne: An officially sanctioned poach....

2003-01-28 Thread George Woltman
Thanks for the insight that some of these exponents might be reporting no
progress because they were manually reserved and running on a UNIX or MAC
box.

I've pruned the list a little bit and released the exponents.

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Re: Mersenne: An officially sanctioned poach....

2003-01-28 Thread George Woltman
At 09:36 PM 1/27/2003 -0800, Mary K. Conner wrote:

Garo identified some Team_Prime_Rib exponents in there.


I'll exempt all Team_Prime_Rib exponents


Looking at the other exponents in the factoring range


I'm not worried about reclaiming factoring assignments right now.


The tsc machines show some very odd behavior.  The exponents do a "red 
light, green light" game.  One exponent I've been following started at 5, 
went to 2, back up to 5, then ran all the way up to 15 before dropping 
back to nothing and now it shows a 1.  Others are similarly dancing around

When factoring, the iterations will increase from 1 to 15 for each bit 
level.  In
other words, the field provides no useful information for trial factoring
assignments.

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Re: VS: Mersenne: An officially sanctioned poach....

2003-01-27 Thread George Woltman
At 10:23 PM 1/27/2003 +0100, Torben Schlüntz wrote:

I don't really understand the question. If these 185
assignments have made NO progress in a year why didn't they expire in
about 60 days automaticly?
Do you by NO progress mean close to NO progress?


Look at this example in the assignments report:

7231183, 327 days, S09625, Cel13

It looks like the machine has reserved several exponents and is slowly
crunching through the first one.  It checks in every 28 days and keeps all
its reservations alive.   It looks like prime95 is miscalculating expected
completion dates and not unreserving the exponents that have not started.


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Mersenne: An officially sanctioned poach....

2003-01-27 Thread George Woltman
It's been quite awhile since I've done a release of exponents
that seem to be stuck - probably over a year.

I've identified 185 exponents that have had NO progress reported and are
either:
a)  Below 12,000,000 and been assigned for 200 days or more, or
b)  Between 12 and 20 million and been assigned for 300 days or more

Does anyone see any problems with releasing these exponents back into
the pool?

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Re: Mersenne: trial factoring

2003-01-08 Thread George Woltman
At 10:15 AM 1/8/2003 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Why is the range 219. not included for TF?


Someone has manually reserved that range for factoring.  I guess
they are only factoring to 2^60 or 2^62.  I'll eventually open that range
up for factoring to the correct depth.



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Mersenne: Version 22.13

2002-12-28 Thread George Woltman

I've uploaded a fix for an ECM bug.  If you run ECM on a P4 you should
upgrade to 22.13.  All other users can continue to use 22.12.

V22.13 is at ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2213.zip
and ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2213.exe

The ECM bug only occurred for exponents below 172,000 and near an
FFT crossover point.  It did not affect any Fermat factoring.  Most
Cunnningham factoring was unaffected because the FFT crossovers are
at 743 and 1473.  If you want to determine if some of your past ECM runs
on a  P4 were affected, then in v22.12 turn on round-off checking, and
run an ECM curve on the exponent with B1=100.  If the round-off error
is 0.5 then your past ECM runs were affected by the bug.

The good news is v22.13 does have a P-1 and ECM QA suite implemented.
There is a pretty good chance that the last serious bug in this area of the
program has been found.  I've run a small QA file successfully.  Over time
the QA volunteers will undoubtedly improve the QA suite.

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Re: Mersenne: Has something gone wrong with the mersenne.org server?

2002-12-05 Thread George Woltman
At 01:22 PM 12/5/2002 +, Barry Stokes wrote:


I tried to look at my personal stats today, and got this:

"CGI Error

The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of
HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:

Could not load ADVAPI32.dll"

Has something gone wrong?


Brad was trying out a new firewall at Entropia.  Why it caused this problem
both yesterday and today is unknown.  A reboot "fixed" the problem for now.


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Re: Mersenne: P-1 and non k-smooth factors

2002-12-04 Thread George Woltman
At 10:31 PM 12/3/2002 +, Daran wrote:

For clarity, let's write mD as x, so that for a Suyama power E, the exponent
(x^E - d^E) is thrown into the mix when either x-d or x+d is prime in
[B1...B2], (and only once if both are prime).  This works because (provide E
is even) x^E - d^E = (x-d)*(x+d)*C where C is a sum of higher order terms.
The benefit of prime-pairing arises when E=2.  The cost of higher E is
AFAICS linear in multiplications.  The benefit of higher E comes from any
additional factors thrown into the mix by C.  This benefit is greatest if C
has factors slightly > B2

For E=4, C = (x^2 + d^2)
For E=6, C = (x^4 + x^2d^2 + d^4) = (x^2 + xd + d^2)*(x^2 - xd + d^2)
For E=8, C = (x^2 + d^2)*(x^4 + d^4)


The analysis is more complex than this.  It really depends on the prime
factorization of these algebraic factors.  If an algebraic factor's prime
factorization contains factors all below B2, then the algebraic factor
does you no good.

Why not take your example:
"on an 8.1M exponent, B1=45000,
B2=731250 and varying values for D and E, I get the following results
D E Stage 2 transforms
420 2 93946
420 4 98618 (the default for my memory settings)"
and write a program that emulates stage 2's selection of (x^E - d^E), does
a prime factorization of the value, and keeps track of which factors above B2
get included.  It should be possible to calculate your increased chance of 
finding
a factor (someone please fill in the formula here).

Then you can run this on several D,E options and compare it to your count of
FFT transforms and come up with the optimal choice of D and E.

I'd be greatly interested in such a study.

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Re: Mersenne: P-1 and non k-smooth factors

2002-11-27 Thread George Woltman
At 06:05 PM 11/27/2002 +, Daran wrote:

>  if (D <= 180) E = 2;
>  else if (D <= 420) E = 4;
>  else if (D <= 2310) E = 12;
>  else if (D <= 6930) E = 30;
>  else E = 48;
>

I understand why it chooses the values of D that it does, but why these
values of E?  I understand why E must be even, and that higher powers ought
to be highly composite, but wouldn't 6 be a good intermediate value?  24?
60 for the top end?


No good reason.  As far as I know, there haven't been any studies on the
best values to choose for E.



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Re: Mersenne: New small exponents released ?

2002-11-24 Thread George Woltman
At 12:48 AM 11/25/2002 +0200, Nuutti Kuosa wrote:

for triple checking ?


Yes.

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Re: Mersenne: Poach?

2002-11-19 Thread George Woltman
At 01:30 PM 11/19/2002 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Last week this was a 1st test assignment, now it's a double check?
Unfortunately there was a server sync in the meantime, so I can't check the
cleared.txt. But I find in hrf3.txt:

11976787,berra,WV1


The berra test had errors and the exponent was re-released for first-time
testing.  I did this by manually setting the exponent's state.  My guess is the
database sync caused the server to once again notice it has a result for the
exponent and now flags it as a double-check.

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Re: Mersenne: Request for help (especially ECM)

2002-11-13 Thread George Woltman

Many thanks to all the ECM curves with group orders that were sent to me
over the last week.  I should have enough to build a reasonable QA suite.


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Mersenne: Request for help (especially ECM)

2002-11-08 Thread George Woltman
P-1 and ECM factoring is fairly complex code with several different
paths based upon how much memory is available.  I'd like to develop a
fast QA suite for P-1 and ECM factoring.  I intend to hardwire the test cases
into prime95 (or read the data from a QA file) so that I can run them with
several different memory settings without having to change local.ini memory
settings.

To make this test relatively fast I need one or two dozen fairly smooth P-1 
test
cases for  exponents in the 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 range.  This shouldn't
be hard to compute.  I can do it, but lets see if a volunteer would like to
send me some in the next day or two.

A harder problem is finding some smooth ECM curves to test.  I do not
have tools to compute group orders.  If someone can help by finding a
couple of dozen smooth ECM test cases for exponents between 1000
and 50, I would be most grateful.

With your help this long overdue test suite can lead to version 22.13 and 22.14
next week!

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Mersenne: Here we go again.... v22.12 now available.

2002-11-08 Thread George Woltman
For the second time this week a P-1 bug has been found and fixed.  Version
22.12 can be downloaded from http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

The bug affects P-1 stage 2 in "low memory" situations.  The bug has
been present since version 20.

From the whatsnew.txt file:

A bug was fixed that caused some factors to be missed in stage 2 of P-1
when the available memory did not let the program allocate 12 temporary
variables.  If testing a number in the 16 millions using an FFT size of
768K, then each temporary takes 768K * 8 bytes or 6MB.  If your memory
setting was less than 72MB (6MB * 12 temporaries) then you were affected
by the bug.  Actual the program allocates some fixed tables so anything
less than about 75MB triggered the bug.

More details:

If you are double-checking in the 8 millions, the bug would appear if you
have less than 37MB or so allocated to prime95.

This bug did not cause all factors to be missed, in fact it could cause some
factors to be found that ordinarily would not be found.  Specifically, in 
this low-memory situation prime95 steps through the range between B1 and B2 in
multiples of 210.  When processing a prime p, the code actually included the
prime "mirrored" around the previous multiple of 210.  For example, if
21+1 is prime, then 21-1 was improperly included.  If 21+3
is prime, then 21-3 was included.


 

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Re: Mersenne: Re: Bug in version 22.10

2002-11-08 Thread George Woltman
At 06:58 PM 11/8/2002 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The first of these is slightly larger than 2^65, so it was likely
cheaper to find via p-1 than via sieving. But the second is only
a tad larger than 2^63, i.e. under the hardware long int length,
and thus sieving to 2^64 should have been quite fast. George - is
it faster to do p-1 for numbers this size than to sieve to 2^64?


This has been discussed on the list before.  It is actually better to
do the P-1 factoring before doing the last one or two bits of trial
factoring.  It is a small optimization, but maybe one day it could be
implemented.


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Re: Mersenne: Bug in version 22.10

2002-11-05 Thread George Woltman
At 07:19 PM 11/5/2002 +, Brian J. Beesley wrote:

One thing you might consider - when you change to v22.11, check out your
results file. If you have a P-1 run logged on an exponent you haven't yet
started LL/DC testing, make it run the P-1 again (change the ,1 at the end of
the assignment line in worktodo.ini to ,0).


I'd actually recommend not doing the P-1 again.  If you are using enough
memory to run both P-1 stages, then the bug did not affect stage 1 but did
affect stage 2.

If you run only stage 1 of P-1, then the bug would cause no factors to be 
found.
In this case, you might consider re-running P-1 again as Brian suggests (but
only if you used 22.10 dated after Sept 28).

 I did this on my own system & have been rewarded with _two_ factors found -


This is way above expectations!   Nevertheless, I'm always happy to get the
factors.

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Re: Mersenne: Bug in version 22.10

2002-11-05 Thread George Woltman
At 06:51 PM 11/5/2002 +, Daran wrote:

Does this version only affect 22.10?  Or versions before that?


Only version 22.10 and only if the executable is dated after Sept 28.


> Sorry for the trouble,

That's what beta testers are for.


That's what was so ironic.  After being in a relatively problem-free beta test
period I finally called it official.  Murphy's Law strikes again with a bug 
a few
days later.


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Mersenne: Bug in version 22.10

2002-11-04 Thread George Woltman
Hi all,

Sigh   If you downloaded a version 22.10 dated September 28 or later,
then please upgrade to version 22.11 at http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

The bug causes factors to be missed in the final stage of P-1 and ECM
factoring.  While this isn't the end of the world, it will cause you to run an
unnecessary LL test.

Sorry for the trouble,
George

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Re: Mersenne: Torture test allocating hundreds of MB?

2002-10-29 Thread George Woltman
At 09:34 PM 10/29/2002 -0500, Nathan Russell wrote:

 I had the memory usage set to the max allowable, because I
wanted P-1 to succeed whenever possible, even if it inconvenienced me
- I do most of my academic work via VNC into timeshares, so it isn't a
big deal if the system thrashes.

Is that the Wrong Thing (tm) to do in terms of improving Prime95's
efficiency?


Yes, thrashing reduces prime95's throughput.



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Re: Mersenne: Torture test allocating hundreds of MB?

2002-10-29 Thread George Woltman
At 02:08 PM 10/28/2002 -0500, Nathan Russell wrote:

However, when I tried to run a torture test to verify that everything
was okay, I saw Prime95 suddenly allocate over 200 MB of memory for no
apparent reason, and the computer began thrashing.


Late version 22 executables use lots of memory to run the torture test.
It uses the maximum of the daytime and nighttime memory values that
you specified in Options/CPU.  Since this causes thrashing, I'd reduce
those values.  If those values are already small then let me know as you've
uncovered a bug.

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Re: Mersenne: On v18 factoring

2002-10-22 Thread George Woltman
At 02:03 AM 10/23/2002 +, Russel Brooks wrote:

How about a "Black List" of clients that the server will no
longer give work to?  I would think the problem of pcs no longer
under your control would be an increasing problem.


We want to give them double-checks so that the client isn't continually
asking the server for work.  This wastes bandwidth needlessly.


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Re: Mersenne: On v18 factoring

2002-10-22 Thread George Woltman
At 07:03 PM 10/22/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote:

Maybe future versions of Prime95 could have the capability of being
shutdown from the server when the program does a regular check in.


Actually, version 19 has that feature.  Too bad its version 18 clients that
are broken!

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Re: Mersenne: On v18 factoring

2002-10-22 Thread George Woltman
Hi,

At 11:09 AM 10/22/2002 -0800, Gordon Bower wrote:

It is running version 18, which was, of course, the latest version out at
the time the machine was last under my control. It's beginning to
experience difficult getting assignments below the the 20.x-million
limit.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to stop a runaway copy of
v18? Perhaps in a few weeks the server can be updated to return an "out of
exponents" error to v18 instead of offering it an assignment it can't
handle?


You cannot stop a runaway v18 factoring client.  It will get and discard
assignments until it gets one below 20.5 million that is not factored to 2^64.
Scott is supposed to be working on a server fix to give these v18 factoring
clients a double-check assignment instead.

Until Scott implements his fix, I periodically release these discarded
exponents so that you don't have to.  I've been watching about 5 machines.
Email me your userid and machine  name and I'll make sure your
exponents get released too.


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Mersenne: version 22.10

2002-10-08 Thread George Woltman


Version 22.10 is the latest beta. If no problems are reported it will become
the official release. You can download it at:
Windows: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2210.zip
Linux: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/mprime2210.tgz
or: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/sprime2210.tgz
NT service: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/winnt2210.zip
It fixes several running-as-a-service problems (multi-processor systems, NT4,
no admin privileges)
Also, double-checking will now trial factor one-bit less than a first-time 
LL test.
This is because finding a factor will save one LL test instead of two.
P-1 factoring already took this into account.


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Re: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else...

2002-10-04 Thread George Woltman

At 06:15 PM 10/4/2002 +0100, Barry Stokes wrote:
>The trouble is, I have now
>completed one of these factoring jobs, and it's no longer assigned to me,
>which is quite annoying, as it means that work is going to be duplicated by
>whoever now has the number.

The work will not get duplicated if the exponent was picked up by one of
the misbehaving v18 clients (not that this absolves me of guilt in creating 
this
situation :)

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Re: Mersenne: My numbers have been re-assigned to someone else...

2002-10-04 Thread George Woltman

At 10:44 AM 10/4/2002 +0100, Barry Stokes wrote:
>When I was checking my individual account page thing, I noticed that several
>of the numbers I was supposed to be factoring didn't appear in my list. I
>then checked the "Hourly World Test Status, Assignments Report" file, and
>found that the numbers I had have now been assigned to other people... 
>Anyone got any ideas as
>to why this is happening?

Oops, I blew it.

I mentioned a few days ago that we are having trouble with version 18
factoring clients grabbing exponents and not processing them.  Scott is
working on a server fix.  In the meantime, I've been locating these exponents
and putting them back in the pool.  Last night, I erred and freed up the
wrong set of exponents (I reran a macro that was a few days old rather than
running the new macro).

There is no way for me to undo the damage I have done.  Sorry.

To avoid duplicate work, check your worktodo.ini file for assignments above
20,540,000.  Then look at your individual account report. If the exponent 
appears
in your worktodo.ini file and not in your individual
account report, then delete it from your worktodo.ini file.

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Re: Mersenne: ERROR 7: Server has run out of exponent to assign.

2002-09-30 Thread George Woltman

At 09:28 PM 9/30/2002 +, Russel Brooks wrote:
>I just got this error msg when my factoring machine uploaded
>results and tried to get more work.
>
> > ERROR 7: Server has run of exponents to assign
>
>What now?

More exponents are now available.   There is a prime95/primenet bug that
caused this.  Version 18 factoring clients are accepting assignments and
tossing them (v18 was designed to only go up to 20.something million).
I'll work with Brad on a solution.

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RE: Mersenne: Composite factors.

2002-09-24 Thread George Woltman

The record P-1 factor is 56379662829467477289264041716715663 or 129
bits.

-Original Message-
I don't think P-1 has found a "proper" factor exceeding 110 bits, yet.

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Re: Mersenne: Order of TF and P-1

2002-09-12 Thread George Woltman

At 06:42 PM 9/12/2002 +, Brian J. Beesley wrote:
>I haven't checked the source from the latest version but the TF limits should
>surely be linked in some way to the LL/DC FFT run length crossovers. Many of
>these _have_ been lowered. Slightly, and especially for P4 systems.

I have not changed the trial factoring limits in version 22.  Actually, 
they haven't
changed in years.

>I would have thought that, since (ignoring runs with errors - which is a
>reasonable first approximation) factoring before DC saves only one LL test,
>whereas factoring before first LL test saves two. So trial factoring (TF)
>depth for DC assignments should be one bit less than for LL assignments -

This is actually a very reasonable and easy to implement idea.  It doesn't
fix all our problems, but it makes things a little bit better.

Optimal trial factoring depth vs. P-1 vs. LL varies from machine to machine.
To further complicate matters, the factoring, first LL test and second LL test
is very likely to be done on different hardware.   In essence, I've just 
"given up"
on analyzing and implementing any improved solution.  The good news is that
implementing the absolutely optimal solution - whatever that is - would improve
GIMPS throughput a very, very tiny amount.

The original point of this thread, that P-1 should be run before running 
the last
one or two bits of trial factoring is true.   Unfortunately, it cannot be 
implemented
without server changes.  If we ever make P-1 a separate work type (also 
desirable),
that would be the time to implement this.

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Mersenne: More error info

2002-08-31 Thread George Woltman

Trying again

Our intrepid researcher broke down the non-clean run stats below.  So if you
get a single error, you've got a 2/3 chance of being OK.  Two or more errors
and your chances are not good.  This is not broken down by error type
(SUM(INPUTS) != SUM(OUTPUTS)  vs.  ROUNDOFF > 0.4)

Number of errors reported   badgood   error_rate
1  314 625 
33.4%
2  192 135 
58.7%
3  107   63 
 62.9%
4  74 36 
  67.3%
5  53 17 
  75.7%
6  48 20 
  70.6%
7  31   7 
   81.6%
8  30 10 
  75.0%
9  17 10 
  63.0%
1025   2 
  92.6%
 >10  37558 
 86.6%

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Mersenne: More error info

2002-08-31 Thread George Woltman

Our intrepid researcher broke down the non-clean run stats below.  So if you
get a single error, you've got a 2/3 chance of being OK.  Two or more errors
and your chances are not good.  This is not broken down by error type
(SUM(INPUTS) != SUM(OUTPUTS)  vs.  ROUNDOFF > 0.4)

Number of errors reported   badgood   error_rate
131462533.4%
219213558.7%
31076362.9%
4743667.3%
5531775.7%
6482070.6%
731781.6%
8301075.0%
9171063.0%
1025292.6%
 >103755886.6%

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Mersenne: Error rates

2002-08-30 Thread George Woltman

A user has broken down the GIMPS error rate for exponents
between 2 million and 7 million.  See ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/err_rate.xls.
I'd ignore the data from 6 million to 7 million as there are many 
triple-checks to be done.  The data from 5 million to 6 million will not 
change much at all.  The
data from 2 million to 5 million is accurate.

There is a lot of interesting data in this spreadsheet.  Our overall error 
rate is  roughly 3.5%.  If you have an error-free run, the error rate is in 
the 1.4% to 2% area.  If you have an SUM(INPUTS) != SUM(OUTPUTS) error or 
ROUNDOFF > 0.40 error that is not caused by an approaching FFT crossover, 
then there is a 56% chance that your LL test will be no good!

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Mersenne: Mime-Version: 1.0

2002-08-29 Thread George Woltman

Version 21 seems to be back online.

The problem was with the GIMPS proxy at Entropia.com. This
proxy routes version 21 contacts from entropia.com to mersenne.org.
Version 22 contacts mersenne.org directly.

Sorry for all the difficulties!

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Re: SV: Mersenne: Unable to communicate with server.

2002-08-29 Thread George Woltman

At 10:59 PM 8/29/2002 +0200, Torben Schlüntz wrote:
>What is going on? Yes, it is true I get this error message 29.
>Do I have to update to 22.8 when I'm mostly do trial factoring?

I've contacted Brad at Entropia to figure out what is different
with the server.  It is my intention to get it working with version 21
again.  This is not some sinister ploy to force users to upgrade to
version 22!

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Re: Mersenne: Unable to communicate with server.

2002-08-29 Thread George Woltman

At 11:04 PM 8/28/2002 -0700, Andy Kohler wrote:
>Where can we download version 22.8?  The webpage at 
>http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm shows only version 21.4, from 22 Sep 
>2001 (for Windows).  Thanks --Andy

The freesoft.htm page now has a link to version 22.  I've hastily
added it thanks to this error 29 mess.  Not surprisingly, my email load
has gone up with all the version 21 Windows clients raising an error.

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Re: Mersenne: 22.8.1 has increased iteration time

2002-08-29 Thread George Woltman

At 06:30 AM 8/29/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote:
>I have noticed a small but definite increase in the iteration time of
>version 22.8.1 as opposed to 21.4.

It is possible that version 22.8 and 21.4 are using different FFT sizes.
Version 22 is more conservative in selecting which FFT size to use.
If I knew the exponent, I could tell you if this is the cause

>I am continuing processing on the very same exponent using the new
>version.  Is this allowed?

Yes.

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Re: Mersenne: Unable to communicate with server.

2002-08-28 Thread George Woltman

At 09:05 AM 8/28/2002 -0700, Bob Margulies wrote:
>For the past several hours, while trying to get exponents from the
>server, I have been getting:
>
>PRIME95 caused an exception 6baH in module RPCRT4.DLL at 0187:7fb953e3,
>followed by a shutdown.
>
>Is there a way for me to keep running 21.4.1 while this is resolved?

Make sure prime.ini contains the line UseHTTP=1.

The server has been up for the last few hours, so you shouldn't be
having troubles.  If you still are we may need to upgrade to version 22.8
and turn on the new communication debugging option.  Email me privately
if we need to do this.

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Re: Mersenne: access to primenet server

2002-08-25 Thread George Woltman

Hi,

At 10:37 AM 8/24/2002 +0100, Gareth Randall wrote:
>Any chance of implementing some sort of status output to say "I got to 
>here..."? Something like this:
>
>[time] PID etc  DNS resolved server  #think this is actually just an IP
>[time] PID etc  Open connection to proxy
>[time] PID etc  Connection to proxy made
>[time] PID etc  Asked to connect to primenet server
>[time] PID etc  Got connected to primenet server
>[time] PID etc  Sent the data or request  # you know what I mean
>[time] PID etc  Got the expected response
>[time] PID etc  Saved the updated state to disk  # catch filesys errors
>[time] PID etc  Closed connection to proxy
>
>Whichever is the last entry in the log is the next stage at which you 
>should be looking at. Ideally a competent user can see immediately where 
>it got stuck.

The closest thing to this is setting Debug=1 in primenet.ini (version 22 only).
It is a bit more verbose than this and the output is a little more cryptic.

>This sort of error tracking is particularly relevant to me at the moment, 
>because I have recently been involved in supporting Windows apps, and 
>no-one has designed anything to narrow down problems.

I can sympathize with your plight.   Administration is often a thankless job.

>  Error messages are useless and say nothing more than "er, it didn't 
> work", and no clue is given as to which part of the procedure failed.

Guilty as charged.

>On the subject, all programmers should try to avoid giving their error 
>messages in little pop-ups that can't be cut and pasted. Don't just follow 
>the crowd. Make your error messages appear in text boxes which don't 
>require people to manually retype them. :-)

But this is the Microsoft standard!  The right answer is for MS to change the
way windows works - to allow copying text from message boxes.

Best regards,
George

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Re: Mersenne: Question about PrimeNet Individual Account Reports

2002-08-25 Thread George Woltman

At 08:37 AM 8/25/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote:
>In looking at my PrimeNet individual account report, I read the
>following sections:
>
>Unspecified type  :  1
>
>my desktop is a 2.2GHz Pentium IV and is
>checked as such in Options / CPU.
>
>Am I doing something wrong, or is this normal?

This is a known bug in the individual account reports.  P4s are reported
as unspecified type.

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Re: Mersenne: Status

2002-08-19 Thread George Woltman

At 07:30 AM 8/19/2002 +0100, Daran wrote:
>So how come I've just been given this assignment:
>
>Test=9620617,64,1

The first test of this number had 5 roundoff > 0.40 errors.  Since the result
is highly suspect, it was re-released as a first time test.  Consider yourself
lucky to get such a small exponent - faster runtime and better chance of
yielding a Mersenne prime than the first time tests in the 16 millions.

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Re: Mersenne: Question about setting available memory

2002-08-17 Thread George Woltman

At 07:16 AM 8/17/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote:
>It is my understanding from reading the documentation that setting the
>available memory only affects the P-1 factoring stage and not the main
>LL test.  Is this correct?

Yes.

>The reason I am asking is because of a great difference that I have
>noticed in the iteration time of the LL test on my 2.2GHz desktop and my
>1.0GHz laptop while running comparable sized numbers on both machines.
>I would expect to see the laptop taking a little more than double the
>iteration time of the desktop.  Instead, I am seeing a 5x difference.

The P4 2.2GHz machine uses the SSE2 instructions for a big speed up.
See the http://www.mersenne.org/bench.htm for timings from a wide
variety of machines

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Re: dual-P4 xeon/win2k/prime95 / Re: Mersenne: GIMPS forums!

2002-08-15 Thread George Woltman

At 08:16 PM 8/15/2002 -0400, Steve Elias wrote:
>thanks for the new forums, George. (fora?)

Thank Xyzzy, he did all the work.  All I did was make the first post and
announce it to the mailing list.

>at work lately i've been trying to set up a dual-P4 win2k system with
>prime95.  but when it boots only one of the prime95 starts up when i
>log in.  both are set for "start at bootup" & each with cpu-affinity
>hard-coded.

I'm guessing you've installed prime95 twice in two different directories.
If so, what is happening is both are trying to use the service name
"Prime95 Service" and overwriting each other.

Try turning off "Start at Bootup" on both.  Edit one of the local.ini files and
add "ServiceName=Prime95 Service #2".  Turn on "Start at bootup"
on both.

If you run the second prime95 from the same directory with the -A1
command line argument, then you shouldn't have this trouble.

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Mersenne: GIMPS forums!

2002-08-15 Thread George Woltman

Hello all,

Thanks to the dedication of a GIMPS member, we now have our very own
bulletin board system.  Check it out at http://www.teamprimerib.com/gimps/

The forums are empty now, but you can be among the first to start up a new
thread.   Sign up and introduce yourself, then we'll see what this grows into!

I know some folks prefer the mailing list approach for news.  I'll continue
to post news on this mailing list and on the forums.  The forums will let
us do searches and see past posts easily.

Have fun,
George

P.S.  Don't be fooled by the "www.teamprimerib.com" in the URL.  The forums
are for all GIMPS members and will not be used as promotional tool for this
particular GIMPS team.

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Re: Mersenne: Latest version p95v21.exe ??

2002-08-14 Thread George Woltman

At 06:35 PM 8/14/2002 -0400, Nick Glover wrote:
>I'm curious, where does the roundoff checking every iteration come 
>in?  This explains how the program chooses the FFT size, but what are the 
>conditions for when roundoff checking for every iteration is used?  Based 
>on my understanding, it seems to me that if the soft crossover calculation 
>determines that an exponent can't be run at the smaller FFT size, then 
>maybe it should just do the exponent at that FFT size with roundoff 
>checking every iteration instead of moving to a larger FFT size.  Does the 
>program currently do this?

If prime95 decides to use the smaller FFT size (the thousand iterations
average error was below the 0.241 to 0.243 threshold), then the LL test
uses the smaller FFT size with error checking every iteration.  This will
protect you from roundoff errors up to 0.6.

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Re: Mersenne: Latest version p95v21.exe ??

2002-08-14 Thread George Woltman

At 08:11 PM 8/13/2002 -0700, Anurag Garg wrote:
> Is it possible to find out what the FFT crossovers for x87 CPUs
>are with the latest version?

Yes and no.

This table shows FFT size, v21 x87 crossover, v22.8 x87 crossover,
v21 SSE2 crossover, v22.8 SSE2 crossover.  As you can see v22
is more liberal with x87 crossovers and more conservative with
SSE2 crossovers.

262144  5255000 5255000 5185000 5158000
327680  652 6545000 6465000 6421000
393216  776 7779000 769 7651000
458752  904 9071000 897 8908000
524288  1033103810241018
655360  1283128912721265
786432  1530153415161507
917504  1785178917661755
1048576 2040204620182005
1310720 2535253925092493
1572864 3015301929922969
1835008 3510352034863456
2097152 4025403039783950
2621440 5000500249354910
3145728 5940595158925852
3670016 6910693668656813
4194304 7930793078367791

Now the gotcha.  In v22.8, FFT crossovers are flexible.  If you test an
exponent within 0.2% of a crossover point, then 1000 sample iterations
are performed using the smaller FFT size and the average roundoff
error calculated.  If the average is less than 0.241 for a 256K FFT or
0.243 for a 4M FFT, then the smaller FFT size is used.

Brian Beesley has been a great help in investigating revised crossover
points and analyzing the distribution of round off errors.  We noticed
that consecutive exponents can have a pretty big difference in average
roundoff error (e.g. one exponent could be 0.236 and the next 0.247).
This is why I elected to try the flexible approach described above.  The
0.241 to 0.243 average was chosen hoping for about 1 iteration in a
million generating a roundoff error above 0.4.  We might change the 0.241
to 0.243 constants with more data - it is hard to get enough data points
to accurately measure 1 in a million occurrences.

One downside is the server does not know which FFT size is used and
will credit you based on the v21 x87 crossovers.  Thus, if you are a lucky
person, you might get "bonus" CPU credit where you test the exponent
at a smaller FFT size and the server credits you based on the larger
FFT's timing.

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Re: Mersenne: Latest version p95v21.exe ??

2002-08-13 Thread George Woltman

At 10:41 PM 8/13/2002 +, Russel Brooks wrote:
>I'm adding a new pc running GIMPS and went to the web site where
>p95v21 was available.  Isn't this version a bit downlevel?

Try version 22.8 at ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v228.zip.  This is
the last version 22 beta.  If all goes well it will be the official release
in a few weeks.

Let me know if you have problems.


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Re: Mersenne: Double Checking Errors

2002-08-10 Thread George Woltman

At 07:28 PM 8/9/2002 -0700, Gary Edstrom wrote:
>That brings to mind another question.  I was wondering what you
>do when you detect an error during double checking.  Do you notify the
>person that sent in the erroneous result so that he can check out his
>computer further?

No, for several reasons.  1)  We don't know your double-check is wrong
until a triple (or even quadruple) check is run.  Thus, it could be a few 
months
before we'd email you.  2)  If a first time check is bad, it will be two or 
three
years before the double check and triple check come in to confirm this.
3)  It would be a fair amount of work for me.  Right now the server does not
verify double-checks.  That is done by me, with the aid of a program, at home.
Matching bad results with email addresses, sending the email, and wading
through bounced emails is not something I would relish!

Is there interest in adding a new file to ones you can download at the
bottom of http://www.mersenne.org/status.htm?  It could contain all the
confirmed bad results (I have kept this data).  This would make it easier
for you folks to check and see if you have any problem computers.

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Re: Mersenne: V22.7C Warning

2002-07-31 Thread George Woltman

At 08:01 PM 7/30/2002 -0700, Terry S. Arnold wrote:
>I am running 22.5.2 on some P4 boxes and 21.4 on a mix of P III and P II 
>boxes. What is the best version for each of these box types?

You are in good shape.  P4s should be running version 22.5 or later.
Non-SSE2 machines only need to run version 22 if they want to take
advantage of some of the minor fixes and enhancements now available.


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Mersenne: V22.7C Warning

2002-07-30 Thread George Woltman

To those that like to snoop in the ftp://mersenne.org/gimps FTP directory,
DO NOT download p95v227c.zip.  It contains some test code for the
new P4 based Celeron chip with a 128KB cache.  If you run this version
on normal P4's it will run SLOWER than the regular version 22.7.

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RE: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems

2002-07-29 Thread George Woltman

At 10:46 AM 7/29/2002 -0700, Aaron wrote:
>I suppose it's probably documented somewhere, but it seems that Prime95
>ignores any service name settings in the existing NTPrime local.ini
>file...
>
>So I'm still using NTPrime on my dual CPU machines...  Any chance of
>getting prime95 to honor the service name settings in the local.ini file
>just like ntprime did?

Already coded and tested.  Look for the fix next time I upload a new prime95

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Re: Mersenne: last synchronization

2002-07-26 Thread George Woltman

At 05:04 PM 7/26/2002 -0400, David A. Bayer wrote:
>I've noticed this exponent listed for the last 10 or so months on my 
>list.  After the synchronization a few days ago, it still showed up. Any 
>idea why it is not clearing?
>
>  9724961  65 0xAB16847CD1B7CA__20-Nov-00 07:37

There are many problems with merging.   Known problems exist for
exponents above 2^24 and first time tests below 10,000,000.

I do have your result, so if not too much trouble, just ignore the
offending exponent.  

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Re: Mersenne: P4 xeon listed as 'unspecified type'

2002-07-26 Thread George Woltman

At 07:43 PM 7/25/2002 -0700, Daniel Swanson wrote:
> > when using p95v227.zip on a dual P4 Xeon, primenet lists this
> > as 'unspecified type'.
> > This is normal ?
>
>I have a similar problem.  I have 3 P4 1.8 GHz machines running p95 v22.5.1.
>All 3 appear in my Account Report as 'Unspecified type'.

This is a bug/deficiency of the primenet server reports.  On the
http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml web page it is properly
reported as a P4, but on your individual report it is listed as unspecified.

No need to worry about it though.  As long as the client knows its a P4
you will get the right work types and run the P4 optimized code.



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Re: Mersenne: W2K service installation problems

2002-07-25 Thread George Woltman

Hi,

At 09:22 AM 7/25/2002 +0200, Helmut Zeisel wrote:
>I recently upgraded from WinNT to W2K and now want to install
>the service version of mprime again.
>
>Since I previously used ntprime, I tried  "ntprime -install".
>This worked, but starting the service exits with
>
>Could not start the Prime Service service on Local Computer.
>Error 5: Access is denied.
>
>I have administrator rights, so this should not be the cause.
>
>Anyway, I downloaded FireDaemon-Light-1_5-BRC1.exe and installed Prime95.
>Starting FiredDaemonService: prime95 now exits with
>
>Could not start the FireDaemon Service: prime 95 service on Local Computer.
>Error 1: Incorrect function.
>
>Any hints what went wrong?

Not really.

Please try ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v227.zip
The GUI version can now be installed as an NT service.  Just
check the "Start at Bootup" menu option.

This is a new feature so let me know of any problems.

Thanks,
George

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Mersenne: Re: Roundoff errors

2002-07-23 Thread George Woltman

At 06:49 PM 7/23/2002 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >The M12898349 error may be OK as it may have been very
> >close to the limit of the 640K FFT (I don't recall the
> >22.3 crossover points).
>
>According the the GIMPS status page, the 640K crossover
>point for the more-accurate x86 client (i.e. the non-
>SSE2 code) is 12.83M,

Thanks to Brian's research we've revisited all the x87 crossovers.
Some v22 executables had a 12.90M crossover.  This has been
lowered to 12.89M in v22.7.

>Except that P-1 stage 1 (unless I'm mistaken about
>Prime95's particular implementation thereof) uses the
>same FFT-based squaring code that the LL test does.
>it seems curious that Daran mentions seeing the roundoff
>warnings in p-1 stage 1, and not in the subsequent LL
>tests of these exponents. George, is error checking done
>more frequently in p-1 than in LL?

Daran mentioned that he was only doing P-1 factoring,
leaving the LL test for others.  The P-1 factoring code
does error checking just as often as the LL code.


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Re: Mersenne: Error message from prime95 on an old Win95 box

2002-07-17 Thread George Woltman


At 06:01 PM 7/17/2002 -0400, A & T Schrum wrote:
>No go. The box was unchecked. I checked it, restarted Prime95, and the 
>error message was not there. So I unchecked it, restarted Prime95, and the 
>error message came back.

I reactivated an old Win98 box for debugging.  You are correct.  The
error message is harmless.  I've got a fix ready for download at
ftp://mersenne.org/p95v227.zip

The only new feature a v22.7 is SSE2 based trial factoring for factors
above 2^64.  It is about 4 times faster than v22.6.  Since most P4 users
are getting assigned prefactored exponents, the speedup is of no value.
However, if you are working on 10 million digit numbers, you may get
assigned a number that needs factoring and the new code will certainly help.


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Re: Mersenne: Error message from prime95 on an old Win95 box

2002-07-17 Thread George Woltman


At 09:34 PM 7/16/2002 -0400, A & T Schrum wrote:
>I didn't find a reference to this problem. My old PentiumMMX 200 Mhz box 
>running Win95 OSR2 (with tons of patches) now has Prime95 2.26.1 on it and 
>it runs reasonably faster (about 20ms faster at 768K FFT size). But upon 
>startup, Prime95 reports "Can't write registry value" and continues on. 
>Should I be concerned?

I doubt it.  Prime95 should be trying to create a registry entry to run the
program at bootup.  If you uncheck the Options/Start at Bootup menu item
the problem should go away.

I'm curious though.  Do other Win95 users have the same trouble?

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Re: Mersenne: Firedaemon question

2002-07-13 Thread George Woltman

At 11:53 AM 7/13/2002 -0400, Martin Felker wrote:
>This question might be more properly addressed to the Firedaemon people 
>but I though someone here might know the answer really quick.   I am 
>running prime95.exe using Firedaemon RC1 for Windows XP.   For whatever 
>reason, even though I configured the XML file to indicate that prime95 is 
>a console application, I can't bring up the console to see how I'm doing 
>or even what process I'm running.  Any suggestions??

Try version 22.6 at ftp://mersenne.org/p95v226.zip.  The "Start at bootup"
option should install prime95 as an NT service without using firedaemon.

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Re: Mersenne: P-1 limits

2002-07-11 Thread George Woltman


At 12:27 AM 7/11/2002 +0100, Daran wrote:
>P-1 factoring with 459MB available memory, the program chose the following
>limits for these two exponants.
>
>7786567B1=4, B2=64
>7714127B1=4, B2=65
>
>Why did the smaller exponant get the higher B2 limit?

The short answer is I don't know.  I invite someone to figure it out.  Look for
the last routine in commonc.c called guess_pminus1_bounds.

First off, when dealing with P-1 success vs. cost analysis, the difference 
between
64 and 65 is negligible.  Possible reasons for your case:

1)  The code uses inexact interpolation and numerical integration to
compute Dickman's function.
2)  The GCD cost for the larger exponent is higher.  This should be more than
offset by the cost of the extra 72440 doublechecking LL iterations.
3)  There are more trial factors with the smaller exponent in a given range 
because
factors are 1 mod 2p.  The costing routine sums up the chances of finding 
65 bit,
66 bit, 67 bit, etc. factors.  This should be offset by the higher exponent 
having a
better chance of finding a smooth factor (found factors are 2kp+1 where k is
smooth - larger p means smaller k which means a higher chance of success).

Of course, the other possibility is a nasty bug in prime95.

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Re: Mersenne: Extrange assignament

2002-07-11 Thread George Woltman

At 02:00 AM 7/11/2002 +0200, Ignacio Larrosa Cañestro wrote:
>Yesterday, Primenete did assigned to one of the computers that I manage,
>a exponent in the 8 million rank, for first test, not for doublecheck.
>But in the Status page, this rank is complete for first test ...
>
>How is it possible?
>
>The factorization level is 1, if it help ...

The server is having problems with exponents in the 8-10 million 
range.  For reasons
unknown it seems to have forgotten how far these exponents have been factored.
I'll restore this info as I make these exponents available for double-checking.

As to why you got a first test, I can think of two possibilities:

1) The server was confused.
2)  Several months ago I made dozens of these "small" exponents available 
as first-time
tests because the first test had errors.  Maybe one of these timed out and 
was assigned
to you.


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Re: Mersenne: Prime95 as an NT/2000/XP service

2002-06-26 Thread George Woltman

I played around some more with the Services Control Panel Applet.  If you 
uncheck
the "Allow service to interact with desktop" and leave it in the Local 
System account
then the new prime95 service still runs OK.  Prime95 does not appear on the 
end user's desktop.  You can still configure prime95 by stopping the 
service, running prime95 as
a normal app (user privileges rather than Local System privileges), change your
settings, exit prime95, start the service.  Is this secure enough for you 
hardcore
server admins?

I could not get the new prime95 service to run in a user account.  I don't 
know if this
is merely due to my limited NT experience.

At 07:06 PM 6/26/2002 +, Brian J. Beesley wrote:
> > My hope is to eliminate the NTsetup and NTPrime programs with this feature.
>Umm - what is the problem with keeping these?

It just makes my life easier.  Right now if I change a dialog box, I need 
to change
it in Prime95 and NTsetup.

I'm not against supporting the old NT service (maybe without NTsetup), but 
if the
new scheme works it is easier to support only one style of NT service.

>Really dumb question - why does a service need a GUI interface at all?

You don't need it very often - just to do a status check, run a benchmark, etc.
I'd bet most users play with the GUI occasionally for the first month and 
never use it
again.

As to the separate DLL or having a service talk to a gui via named piped 
(the MS
preferred solution, I'm trying to solve the WinXP problem with a minimum amount
of work on my part.  Splitting the working existing GUI into two separate 
pieces is
not an easy chore.

BTW, the WinXP problem is naive home users (like me!) can set up user accounts
for different family members.  In V21 prime95, selecting "start at bootup" 
really
starts at logon and does not handle logging off or a second user logging on 
well
at all.  Naive users are not savvy enough to install the old NT service 
version.

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