not sure if it's possible, but ...
 

... is there a way to have a program run purely on a hard-drive to help determine analysis done in prime95?

I was only thinking this because I'm sitting here, and I have a secondary hard drive, which as far as I can tell is getting no usage while running idle, and it has a substantial amount of free space (>60 Gb) on it, so if there were such a CPU-independent version of this program I could have it on my hard drive, just using the space on there to manipulate data.

I'm no software or hardware guru, and it's somewhat late at night here, so this may just be completely impossible, but I figured why not post and if it is - let's maybe use that to "grind through" these exponents faster

-Tom

Re: not sure if it's possible, but ...
 

Not sure what you're getting at, but you can't literally run a program on a hard drive rather than on a CPU. That would be sort of like your body using your stomach cells to think instead of your brain cells.

Short answer, not practical

The processing is done by the CPU. The CPU has a very small amount of very fast memory in it ( cache ), which is used to hold instructions ( program code ) and data. If the code or data or both are too large to fit in the cache(s) then it is retrieved from RAM. If it is too large or not currently stored in RAM it is retrieved from some other storage medium, such as a hard-drive, floppy, CD etc. The problem is if code or data ( files) have to be gotten from a drive it is millions of times slower than from the cache(s).

A computer can run with just the CPU and a extremely small amount of RAM, and the hard-drive doing double duty, acting as the rest of the RAM and as the permanent storage but it will run extremely slowly.

As far as just running programs on the hard-drive without the CPU getting involved it isn't true in any normal sense. ( There may be some extreme proof of concept way of running some code on the computing elements in a drive but it is not of any practical use. )

oh well

It is good to think of new possible ways of using existing computing resources.

In the past year or so with the advent of GPUs it is possible to run programs on video cards. Some of the video cards are capable of higher processing levels than even the fastest CPUs in PCs. If a programmer is very clever they can use the GPU as a secondary computing device and get a decent amount of extra processing done.

Keep thinking.

[quote="dsouza123"]In the past year or so with the advent of GPUs it is possible to run programs on video cards. Some of the video cards are capable of higher processing levels than even the fastest CPUs in PCs. If a programmer is very clever they can use the GPU as a secondary computing device and get a decent amount of extra processing done.
[/quote]

Yes, but how would you output the result?

Perhaps you could get the video card to output the result line to your monitor. In the meantime, you run a screen-scraper program in the background with OCR capability that detects the special video card output and communicates with Primenet. :)

Maybe laser printers are a better bet, since some of them are already network-enabled. LL tests implemented in Postscript anyone? Someone must have already tried this: that would explain the "Countdown to proving M(13466917) is the 39th Mersenne Prime: 85,350" at http://www.mersenne.org/status.htm, which if you do the math is slightly more than 3 human lifetimes.

A better bet would be implementing LL on all those fancy game consoles (PlayStation 2 and XBox).

XBox is only a 733 Mhz P-III CPU.

Not real fast or effective by current CPU standards for Prime work.

I forget what the PS2 uses offhand, but I think it's something even slower - though there are a LOT more PS2s around. PS2s are also RARELY networkable - getting exponents to/from most of them would be a nightmare. XBoxes have the advantage that they were designed for 'net connectivity, so more of them likely ARE connected to the 'net.

The mprime client *probably* will run on an XBox under the XBox LINUX project.

The PS/2 is a 300MHz MIPS CPU...

No need for screen-scraping and ocr.

Using nVidia Cg or MS DX9 HLSL or OpenGL Slang data and programs can be transfered to and from the GPU.

The video card can render to disk. Some of the nVidia and ATI cards can do this.

"It benches how fast Maya plays back the scene in wireframe and shaded mode. It also tests to see how fast the card can render the 100-frame sequence through the Render Hardware Buffer to disk."

http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/2003/08_aug/features/cards_animation_supp4.htm

[quote]The PS/2 is a 300MHz MIPS CPU...[/quote]

Yes, but it has special vector units.

Maybe you can put your Linksys wireless router to use:

http://www.batbox.org/wrt54g-linux.html
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/09/07/1936228.shtml?tid=106&tid=137&tid=185&tid=193

125 MHz MIPS CPU, so no mprime. Maybe Glucas?

According to http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ , there are still 39 Intel 486 boxes crunching, so this probably wouldn't even be the slowest box in GIMPS.