On the subject of people with older machines despairing: on a Sun workstation my
primitive-trinomial program takes about 10 hours (but depending on how many
other engineers are using the machine) to test a q value for Richard Brent's
distributed computing project. (It is to find primitive trinomi
With respect to the argument that an N-processor machine can't do better
than a factor of N speed improvement: the argument sounds airtight, but
it's not always correct. Instances of superlinear speedup occur, and not
merely as a theoretical possibility. While I was consulting at Compaq
(previou
