[quote="trif"]I cannot recommend Rackspace. They harbor spammers who pay a hefty premium, and as such a considerable amount of their IP space is in SPEWS (a public list of spam sources which many sites, including some US government sites, use to block spam with), and their entire IP space in many private blocking lists.[/quote]

Hmm, I hadn't heard about that. Rackspace *used* to be good...

About joining forces with distributed.net
 

I don't believe GIMPS should team up with distributed net, at least not right now. And why? Because of what happened to the OGR effort.

This was a relatively small DC effort, with work being handed out and returned through web forms, in a system requiring human attention on both ends. In 1999, the project was growing to a size which required a different solution. In July that year, OGR-23 became the last work finished by the old project. Then distributed.net stepped in. And what happened next? Let us see what the d.net website says:

"Feb 15, 2000
OGR-24 contest is started, but is later suspended due to unexpected problems.

July 13, 2000
OGR-24 is officially relaunched!

August 1, 2000
The first pass of OGR-24 is completed and distribution of OGR-25 begins. The second verification pass of OGR-24 is done gradually in parallel with the first pass of OGR-25."

That is the last piece of information on OGR in the "History" section of their site.

OGR-24 was supposed to be finished in just a few weeks. But to this day, no final result has come out of the distributed.net effort. The last news on the subject came about a week ago (note that this is not an exact quote, but it captures the spirit of the announcement pretty well): "Yes, there is still a problem with the current client (that everyone is still running), but we think we may be able to fix it, but don't expect anything to happen for a while because we want to get RC5-72 running first."

I would hate to see GIMPS getting "swallowed and killed" by distributed.net. I don't mean to bash the d.net staff. I know they are volunteers and have made great efforts for the good of their projects. But the d.net organization clearly lacks the resources necessary to take on any more tasks right now.

I understand that GIMPS is in a different situation than OGR. It has George taking great care of the client, and it has a working quality assurance effort. Therefore it is not certain that a GIMPS-d.net cooperation would be a fiasco like OGR, but I think the OGR experience is scary enough to make us want to stay away from d.net until all other solutions have been tried.

I agree GIMPS should not be part of d.net. However, we should look at all their publicly available code and features. They certainly have some good features we should mimc.

One more item for the wish list: Priority assignments. As mentioned in another thread we could give out the 1000 lowest double-checks and first-time tests to computers that have completed at least one assignment and running on fast enough computers. This helps the milestones move faster. This is a political hot-potato as it smacks of favoritism, so I'd have to tread carefully before really implementing it.

[quote]This is a political hot-potato as it smacks of favoritism, so I'd have to tread carefully before really implementing it.[/quote]

If this is really a problem, then make assignments prioritized by the most work returned in the last 30 or 60 days.

Assign the most critical, read oldest, work to those computers that have turned in the most work. This is not favoriticism due to the fact you know the oldest work will get done and it NEEDS to get done.

One other lesson to learn from DNet:
 

Have the stats server separate from the DataBase server. An outage on one will not kill the other. An overload on one will not kill the other.


Before someone says "We don't need this, one box is big enough!" let me say "Just because it fits on one box, doesn't mean it should run on one box!"

I'm not sure if it would be worth doing it on two seperate boxes. I think the web server takes up minimal bandwidth. We're going to have to have a high speed connection for the database server, so we might as well put stats there too. Anyways, if the database were to go down, the stats wouldn't be updated, and useless to the most people checking stats (those of us who have look every hour for updates).

As for priority exponents, just get a few volunteers to do them. When they expire, George could have the server hold them, the volunteers would be notified of any new assignments through e-mail, and they would start crunching on it as soon as they could put it into their box's w2d. It wouldn't take many people, seeing as there aren't a vast number of small exponents expiring daily. Like oulnder said, it wouldn't be favoritism, it's just making sure what needs to be done gets done. I think a more dicey issue would be poaching when there are only a few exponents left below M38, and the people are going too slow for our liking. That's why I think we should do priority exponents, just to make sure a slow person doesn't get luckily assigned an important exponent. I know one person got lucky and reserved 20 exponents below 8M, but have yet to check in, and it's been more than a month :evil: . I might poach some of the latter ones they reserved. They're so far down, even if they do check in at some point, there's no way they've started to work on it (which in my book is a legal poach).

[quote="Kevin"]We're going to have to have a high speed connection for the database server[/quote]

The Database server in itself will not need a high speed connection, what it will need is high (or large enough) processing speed. Most of the processing power will probably be used to work out stats. The webserver will server the stats not work it out.

You could even operate with two distinct databases; 1 for assignments and updates, and of for the stats engine. The later is the one with the hard job and IMO should be run as a separate machine.

Alf

[quote="Kevin"]As for priority exponents, just get a few volunteers to do them. When they expire, George could have the server hold them, the volunteers would be notified of any new assignments through e-mail, and they would start crunching on it as soon as they could put it into their box's w2d.[/quote]
I could easily set up 1 or more "private" forums here for the purpose of assigning these exponents...

Email is nice, but I feel that a forum is faster and easier to read... If your email is broken this still works... It also allows one message to be directed towards several participants easily...

We could also make a private forum for the server committee...

The forum idea would work too. I was just thinking that people would check e-mail more often than the forums (at least I hope they would). Depending on how things progress, a new forum area for planning the new server could be helpful. There would be thread for each "issue" so they could be tracked and worked on seperately instead of having them all jumbled in this one big thread.

[quote="Prime95"]
One more item for the wish list: Priority assignments. [/quote]

We can associate each machine some additional fields to indicate the speed and reliability from work turned in the (recent) past. Some one has to figure out an exact formula.

Assignments are easy with that data.

[quote="ebx"]
We can associate each machine some additional fields to indicate the speed and reliability from work turned in the (recent) past. Some one has to figure out an exact formula.
[/quote]

...and don't forget that some people can elude it with the "vacation" option used too often.

Luigi