What happens when....

[mike74]

....a client finds a prime? Is the participant notified immediately? How is the notification made? Thanks in advance.

[vjs]

First if a prime is found the server notifies the project leaders...

They go ahead an contact the user almost imediately, the first thing they do is jump up and down several times and call their friends

Then they probably simultaneously recheck the k/n pair with the sob program themselves and contact the user.

Of course our client doesn't prove a number is prime, it proves a k/n pair is not prime with a very high degree of probablility.

Once they are confidant, at least a day, they try to prove the k/n pair prime.

To actually prove a particular k/n pair is prime takes weeks of time supercomputer time, also different, computers, programs, and O/S, are also used to verify.

Hope this helps.

[Ken_g6[TA]]

You can tell if your client found a probable prime in the logfile. Probable primes have residues that are all 0's, and have Result code 2 instead of 3.

There are a number of programs that can absolutely prove primality. The current fastest is LLR 3.5, obtainable here. It's as fast as the SB client, but it's still in beta. Other, somewhat slower (but not so slow they need weeks on a supercomputer) programs include Proth and OpenPFGW.

[vjs]

Ahh, Your right I was thinking about the

"in just 5 days using only half the power of a Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running Linux on 16 Itanium II 1.3 GHz CPUs"

"eleven days of time on a HP rx5670 quad Itanium II 1.5 GHz CPU server at SHARCNET"

But that was for 2^24,036,583-1 and it was weeks not days.