LLRnet/PRPnet rally April 8-15

Hi everyone,

Our last rally, in early January, is more than two months behind us and lest we let the entire remainder of the winter/early-spring "boom time" when most participants are running at full tilt (rather than partially turned off due to heat constraints) pass us by, it would seem to be high time for another one. We will be holding a 7-day rally starting Monday, April 4 at 7:00 PM GMT and finishing 168 hours later on Monday, April 11 at 7:00 PM GMT. For those of you who can't convert GMT to local time , that's 3:00 PM EDT and 2:00 PM CDT.

Since the last rally, we've managed to polish off the remainder of the 6th Drive (k=600-800) to n=1M--an amazing achievement! These drives keep dropping faster and faster. Our current target is the 7th Drive, taking k=800-1001 to n=1M, and we are currently progressing in the vicinity of n=810K. We would like to finish the 7th Drive to n=1M by mid-April, completing the last of our original project goals still outstanding and nicely coinciding with Peter Benson's impending completion of k=1003-1400 to n=1M, which we're estimating will happen around that time.

The servers are the same as last time: LLRnet port 3000 and PRPnet port 9000. Both servers should be processing work in the vicinity of n=825K+ during the rally, making for medium-sized top-5000 primes that will stay on the list for a good while.

LLRnet config info.:
server = "www.noprimeleftbehind.net"
port = 3000

PRPnet config info.:
server = "www.noprimeleftbehind.net"
port = 9000
Or, in terms of a prpclient.ini config line:
server=G9000:100:1:noprimeleftbehind.net:9000

Be sure and change your userID to whatever ID you prefer. Most people use their ID here at mersenneforum. It is also best to set the cache to something in the vicinity of 2 to 5 pairs.

Info. for downloading the newest LLRnet client can be found at LLRnet supports LLR V3.8! (LLRnet2010 V0.73L).

Info. for downloading the newest PRPnet client can be found at PRPnet.

As a point of interest for those who might be new to NPLB and for others who haven't done any testing with us for a while, we have some milestones that we would like to shoot for in the near future. Please refer to our primes graph and drive progress as well as to our "Countdown meter". NPLB's goal from the start has been to fill in holes in the prime search ranges for Riesel base 2. We'd like to get the dots in that k=300-1001 range fully extended to n=1M by year end 2011 so that they are closer to where k<300 (worked by RPS) is at. As mentioned above, we are currently focusing on the last section of that range, k=800-1001, and hope to get it to n=1M well in advance of our original target.

In our last rally, AMD Users blew everyone else completely out of the water, taking first place in the team stats with a whopping 109,876-test lead over Raiders of the Lost Primes (in second place). Close in third was PrimeSearchTeam, at only 898 tests (less than a day's worth of crunching on two quad-cores) behind ROLP. We also had two new participating teams, SETI.USA and the Dutch Power Cows, taking fourth and sixth place respectively. This time around, I'm not even going to try making any predictions as to what could happen...AMD Users' tour de force last time definitely demonstrated that things can go any number of directions.

On the individual side, Brian (a.k.a. PCZ, but this time crunching for AMD Users as "AMDUpcz") took a clear first place, reaching a peak output of 426 tests/hour! Lennart (a.k.a. sm5ymt) of PrimeSearchTeam was not far behind, hitting the 400 tests/hour mark himself once or twice. James (a.k.a. jamers) and Vaughan, both crunching for AMD Users, took third and fourth place; neither came close to PCZ and Lennart's hourly output, but nonetheless managed to post respectable scores by hanging in there consistently from beginning to end. (With three major power hitters all working for AMD Users, it's no wonder they grabbed the title so easily. )

The last few rallies have been extremely competitive, often to the point where one or two computers in the final day would have made a key difference. This one will surely follow suit, so be sure to spread the word to your teams to come out in full force!

Hope to see you there--let's see if we can make it to n=1M before the rally week is concluded!

Max

P.S.: As before, this is mostly a copy-and-paste from our original announcement in the NPLB thread at http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=15425. You can post any questions either place.