[QUOTE=fivemack;126296]Wacky is, I believe, now running the matrix on an 8G Mac Pro.[/QUOTE]

That is correct. I project 540+ hours for the BL, depending on how much other work (like posting to the Forum, or [gasp] coding, I do)

[QUOTE=fivemack;126296]I bought an 8G machine to process it, but the machine turned out to be hopelessly unreliable.
[/QUOTE]

Have you already tried to reseat the heatsink or to get a better heatsink as suggested in your "wanted: known-good Motherboard" thread? Core temps around 70-72°C look damn high.

I've just ordered a better heatsink; it'll be a bit tedious to get the motherboard out to mount the heatsink support bracket on the back, but so be it. I'm starting to wonder whether my main workstation should also be the NFS server to my compute farm, or whether I should put a disc in the smallest compute-farm node and export from there, copying whole projects to the RAID0 array in the workstation if I want to run them there.

[QUOTE=fivemack;126296]Alex had some time on an enormous cluster in France, and I suggested 2^841-1 after he'd done half the sieving for the C165 project overnight. x-2^140; 2x^6-1 (yes, that sextic has horrible root properties, but what other polynomial is there?)

[/QUOTE]

At least this polynomial has two real roots; 2^841+1 would be worse!

I am using 4x^6 + 1 for 2,776+. This one is really bad.

[QUOTE=fivemack;126351]I've just ordered a better heatsink; it'll be a bit tedious to get the motherboard out to mount the heatsink support bracket on the back, but so be it. I'm starting to wonder whether my main workstation should also be the NFS server to my compute farm, or whether I should put a disc in the smallest compute-farm node and export from there, copying whole projects to the RAID0 array in the workstation if I want to run them there.[/QUOTE]FWIW, I always use the smallest, slowest, oldest machine I have that's still reliable enough to act as a fileserver, task-allocator and other such menial low-cost tasks.

My home ECMNET server, for instance, has been running on a PPro-233 for years.


Paul