Would anyone be interesting in factoring for pay?

[jasong]

I love Distributed Computing. I get uncomfortable if I can't get my afternoon time on the Internet surfing the various forums.

But, while I'm very interested in helping the various projects, I'm not much interested in benchmarking statistics or rising in the stats. Micromanaging my own personal projects makes my OCD brain buzz with joy, but I can micromanage 1 very hands-on project or a huge cluster-based many-computered project, and it's the same buzz. So upgrading my fleet isn't super-appealing.

That being said, I have some money I want to use to support projects, but I still want to be hands-on about it. I would like to try offering people incentives to find factors in the Odd Perfect Number search. Curves aren't tracked, so I'm not going to pay for curves you claim you've done, not even if you can walk on water and have scars on your wrists and ankles. ;)

I've thought about it, and I'm tentatively offering 3/8s of the number of days the ecm program says it will take to find a factor of x-number of digits when the program is run on a Core2 processor with the following command:

echo <number needing to be factored> | ecm -v 11e6-11e6

So, if you run a number through ecm with that command and the number of digits in the factor is 56(the numbers in this explanation are coming out of thin air, though I can calculate them later), then the applicable number would be the 55-digit factor days prediction. Let's say this number is 10 days. So 10*(3/8) is $3.88. So that factor would be worth $3.88 for that particular number.

I don't know anything about electrical costs(including air-conditioning, which is something I need to consider if people like my idea), so this is definitely negotiable, though the decision will apply to everyone. Also, the program calculates in 5-digit increments, so my incentives may be too low, only good for certain numbers, but maybe a horrible offer for the vast majority of numbers.

[Xyzzy]

We had a quad core box given (permanently) to us on the condition that we:

• Run it 24x7
• Keep it free of processes that consume lots of CPU time
• Pay the electricity
• Run a client on each core for the benefactor

We think you'd have a better return on investment with this approach. A new computer like ours costs around $700 and will run for 2-3 years easily.

We think you would have no difficulty at all finding volunteers to be given a box.

(We would be willing to take another!)

[jasong]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

We had a quad core box given (permanently) to us on the condition that we:

• Run it 24x7
• Keep it free of processes that consume lots of CPU time
• Pay the electricity
• Run a client on each core for the benefactor

We think you'd have a better return on investment with this approach. A new computer like ours costs around $700 and will run for 2-3 years easily.

We think you would have no difficulty at all finding volunteers to be given a box.

(We would be willing to take another!)

yes, that's probably a better idea.

I've recently started thinking about an HDTV and possibly a PS3.(I read a PS3 advertisement that my mother says was sitting in the house unopened for months, if it's gotten better than THAT, I might be a PS3 owner soon.)

That being said, what kind of projects would you want to run on a free box?

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by jasong

...

That being said, what kind of projects would you want to run on a free box?

What about No Prime Left Behind (NPLB)? We can use all the help we can get to knock out all of those n=333333 primes on the top-5000 list that we know you love so much , and our LLRnet server would be perfect for something like this.

[jasong]

Originally Posted by Anonymous

What about No Prime Left Behind (NPLB)? We can use all the help we can get to knock out all of those n=333333 primes on the top-5000 list that we know you love so much , and our LLRnet server would be perfect for something like this.

The math projects are run because it thrills my OCD brain to do something like that. If I don't have control of the box, the choices are going to be medical and scientific research.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by jasong

The math projects are run because it thrills my OCD brain to do something like that. If I don't have control of the box, the choices are going to be medical and scientific research.

Well, you wouldn't have to use LLRnet...we've got plenty of work for both manual LLR and manual sieving.

[IronBits]

Can you get LLRnet ported to a PS3 ?
I'd have 70 3.2 GHz cores to help you out ;)

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by IronBits

Can you get LLRnet ported to a PS3 ?
I'd have 70 3.2 GHz cores to help you out ;)

Somebody would have to rewrite the LLR code essentially from scratch--because the current LLR code contains quite a lot of x86 assembler in its core components, and thus can not be compiled for anything other than x86. However, I imagine it would be possible to write an LLR program for other architectures, including the PowerPC (which the main core of the PS3 essentially is) and the Cell SPE's (the rest of the PS3's cores).

Simply porting LLR to the PowerPC would be a major benefit in itself--then BlisteringSheep could have the option of putting his huge sieving farms on LLR, too!

Maybe such a port of LLR could use Mlucas or Glucas (the LL testing applications for PowerPC and other non-x86 architectures) as its base?

[rogue]

Originally Posted by Anonymous

Somebody would have to rewrite the LLR code essentially from scratch--because the current LLR code contains quite a lot of x86 assembler in its core components, and thus can not be compiled for anything other than x86. However, I imagine it would be possible to write an LLR program for other architectures, including the PowerPC (which the main core of the PS3 essentially is) and the Cell SPE's (the rest of the PS3's cores).

Simply porting LLR to the PowerPC would be a major benefit in itself--then BlisteringSheep could have the option of putting his huge sieving farms on LLR, too!

Maybe such a port of LLR could use Mlucas or Glucas (the LL testing applications for PowerPC and other non-x86 architectures) as its base?

I know that Jean has been working on a port, but the last time I talked to him there were some issues in the code. I don't know the current status.

[Joshua2]

I would be interested in working on a project for pay.