Boinc sieving

[Nuri]

Did not know this.
I didn't want to resurrect an old thread.

May be its worth rethinking of that option a bit. It has been two years and people might have changed their views, who knows.

Having said that, I feel like we're way way way ahead at sieving (relatively to PRP of course) and if we were going to get a significant resource like this, it would make sense to do PRP instead of sieving.

[vaughan]

Nuri I think that Lee is working towards a BOINC version of LLR'ing.

It is true there were lots of posts in the bugs list section of the forum but that is forgivable for a pre-Alpha project. It is much more stable now and I recommend that the SOB team consider the virtues of the BOINC platform. BOINC Riesel Sieve is now so easy to run it is "set and forget".

my 2c

[hhh]

Nuri, I disagree with your opinion. On the contrary, we need more sieving rather than less. We still find more factors per time than we can perform PRP-tests; and we still have a P-1 portion of the project that could be useless, given a better sieve point. And there is joint sieving with lots of work.

[dudlio]

Nuri:

>Having said that, I feel like we're way way way ahead at sieving (relatively to PRP of course)

I said this 2+ years ago and I'll say it again,

sieving gets 1 factor per day

prp gets 1 factor per week

do the math.

Initially I calculated u guys should sieve 500T to 2P and you are approaching 2P today, so I stand by my calcs.

If you expect to PRP some factors before 50M, that would make sieving less effective. But it's been 1 year+ since a proof, so keep sieving

[jasong]

Nuri:

>Having said that, I feel like we're way way way ahead at sieving (relatively to PRP of course)

I said this 2+ years ago and I'll say it again,

sieving gets 1 factor per day

prp gets 1 factor per week

do the math.

Initially I calculated u guys should sieve 500T to 2P and you are approaching 2P today, so I stand by my calcs.

If you expect to PRP some factors before 50M, that would make sieving less effective. But it's been 1 year+ since a proof, so keep sieving

I seem to remember a famous prime-finder(I forget you) recommending that sieving should be removing twice as many factors as PRPing if it's to be thought of as effective.

[dudlio]

>I seem to remember a famous prime-finder(I forget you) recommending that sieving should be removing twice as many factors as PRPing if it's to be thought of as effective.

That's probably true. Sieving (n=50M) is done way out ahead of PRP'ing (n=~10M) so there is a speculative nature to it. You can figure on a 2:1 break-even point rather than 1:1 because of the unknown. PRP's are real proofs and so they hold more weight. For example, if a prime is found at 25M, then all the sieving 25-50M would be ineffective; thus a 2:1 ratio.

However, there are ~1000 users PRP'ing and only 20 users sieving. With 98% of the project on PRPing, it's doubtful we've ever gotten close to 2:1. If 2:1 is the correct ratio, then we should have 300 people sieving and 600 people PRP'ing.

That's just basic math.


hhh: >SoB has so many users with that much machines who only want to run an out of the box thingy and just are too lazy to sieve. So, I think a small sieve wrapper would do the affair

Agreed. PRP has always had a nice client-server wrapper. It downloads a block, tests it, and uploads the results. There's no reason why we couldn't have a sieve client that does the same thing: reserves a small range, sieves it, and uploads the results.

I've already written a program to submit sieves. With a similar HTTP posting program, we could reserve ranges on Matt's site and automate the whole sieving process. All it would take is a bit of human coordination to make sure that Matt's site can handle the traffic, errors, timeouts, etc.

[Death]

my 2 с

there'll be much more users that use boinc and don't want to bother with downloading files, extract it and reserve some numbers somewhere

they just configure boinc to run sieve task - and voila! ann files needed to sieve downloads automatically and results goes where they should )))

and having sieve in a project list at http://www.boincstats.com/ can attract curious users. (like me in early boinc years when I test every boinc project. there was 5 of them =)))