Any news?

[Bananaman42]

The front page news is from January, and the most recent forums posts are also a bit outdated. Should I assume that no news is good news? Are tests progressing well? Is sieving being effective? Are we getting close to eliminating another k?

[enderak]

I think things are still progressing well, despite the recent silence around here.
As for being close to finding a prime, I sure hope so!

[imwithid]

I'll second that.

I think the silence is largely reflective of the SB - Primegrid alliance combined with no news of progress or upgrades. With multicore systems creeping up and making up the majority and with fewer dedicated-one-cause suppliers of spare processing, I think that this project may eventually become a division of Primegrid completely. One can see it in the statistics pages (declines in most vital statistics - daily tests completed, new users, users active in last two weeks, etc.). Year over year, they're down (even though over all work may be stable or up).

There could be other factors, but I'd rather not speculate on the pessimistic side of things.

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

Yeah I had to retire the single core XP2000+ I had on as well the PSU on it well lets just say the inside of it looked like a limestone cavern after a few thousand years yeah the caps had all gone and because it was fitted upside down the caps had leaked downward looked really nice decided to retire it totally as it was still running win 98se, no plans on replacing it as I have a nice Quad and another PC on BOINC that will do me.. I did my bit to remove k/n pairs

[Frodo42]

Its summer, I have no need for the extra heating and I am away from home with work most of the time, so my i7 isn't producing much at the moment, but when it get's cold here in Denmark and I am more at home the i7 will start crunching again.

I have my work pc (dual core) doing some SB work through Primegrid and Boinc, not much compared to what the i7 does back home though, but every little bit counts.

[imwithid]

I think another concern may be electricity rates. In the last two years (especially the last couple of months), electricity rates have moved towards a free(er) rate system using real-time metering on top of recently introduced tax reforms (tax harmonization in BC and Ontario) leading to increased rates of taxes upon increased rates per unit consumption (in many provinces in Canada - not sure US or elsewhere). This has definitely limited my contribution; Given my laptop is an old Centrino 1.6Ghz, it takes about half a year to complete a single job (making it not worth using to run a given test). Until my laptop bites the dust and I get a new one, my contribution will be about 1/4 of what it used to be.

[Deciheximal]

I think that this project may eventually become a division of Primegrid completely.

Wouldn't that mean a mandatory switch to BOINC? I hope not!

[opyrt]

I think that this project may eventually become a division of Primegrid completely.

I think that is highly unlikely. Just look at the Prime Sierpinski Project. It's been available through BOINC for quite a while, and still exists in its original form. The last prime we found was actually through the native project and not through PrimeGrid.