LLRnet/PRPnet rally August 12-19

Hi everyone,

Based on comments provided after our last rally, we've decided to try something new this time: a week-long rally! :D We figured that if people are going to go to all the trouble of moving their cores over to the rally servers, why do it all over again to take them back off in only 48 hours? PrimeGrid has done week-long rallies in the past with success, so it's not an entirely new idea; we're hoping it will go over well here too.

The rally will begin Thursday, August 12 at 7:00 PM GMT and finish 168 hours later on Thursday, August 19 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. Last time we had to do crazy stuff with PRPnet port 9000 since LLRnet reports local time and PRPnet GMT, but since then PRPnet has been changed to report local time as well, so the official start/end times should be pretty straightforward.

As last time, this rally will be focusing on the 5th Drive, our priority for the rest of the year (or until we finish it to n=1M, which will hopefully come first). That means LLRnet port 3000 and PRPnet port 9000, both of which should be in the vicinity of n=850K-900K during the rally.

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 at from around 2 to 10 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 all along 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. In targeting k=400-600 for the 3rd consecutive time in this rally, we have set a relatively aggressive goal to have it tested completely to n=1M by year end 2010.

Last time we had a very close race between ROLP and PrimeSearchTeam, the latter ending up winning by a mere 194 k/n pairs. :eek: We also had participation from both AMD Users and Team-Goobee.org, coming in 3rd and 4th place respectively. But Free-DC didn't even make a showing for the second rally in a row--come on guys, what's up with our former repeated rally champs? :hiya:

Hope to see you guys there--let's make this rally even more exciting than the last one! :D

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=13672. You can post any questions either place.