long-term sieving strategy
It sounds like Louie has sieved most of these candidates to around 400G or a little more. On the other hand, it looks like Sanders and friends have sieved k=4847 from 200G to 1T and so have eliminated about 5% of the candidates between 2M and 3M. That suggests to me that the ideal sieving limit for all these k values should be several times larger than current limits, maybe even 5T to 10T. Unfortunately, we are getting close to starting on the n ranges from 2M to 3M soon, so there won't be time to sieve that far. However, we also need to be ready with well-sieved values when we reach 3M. I think that it does not make sense to not take advantage of the power of distributed computing for the sieving part of the project. However, the files involved will be large, maybe 1Mbyte or so, and it would probably make the most sense for Louie to use Paul's new multiple k sieve on a range that would keep us busy for a couple of years, maybe 3M to 20M (or even higher). Other people who want to sieve could work further in the meantime on the 2M to 3M range until we start making headway past 2M.
Most candidates get removed in the early stages of sieving, which is why it would be better for that work to be done by Louie on the University cluster. Once he gets as far as 200G, my guess is that he will still have around 700,000 candidates left with n between 3M and 20M. Such a master file can be compressed to around 700 Kbytes, and in fact, sievers won't have to update their working master file that often, since they will just report back with lists of the values they have eliminated. But given that around 20M, we want to be sieving way, way beyond our present sieving limits, maybe even above 500T, it seems to me that the total ongoing sieving effort needs to be at least a few per cent of the total project effort. I also see this as an advantage to the project in that some people are attracted to a project where they see some division of labor in the total effort. (For example, a number of people in GIMPS specialize in doing only factoring.)