PrimeGrid asks: Is PSP dead?
 

The title says it all, and it's more than idle curiosity.

The PSP servers have been down, and we've been unable to contact either Citrix or ltd. In less than three days we're starting a challenge that includes PSP and we may exhaust our allocated n=17M range of PSP tasks.

While the last thing we want to do is ignore other people's reservations, there seem to be no servers or people still operating the original PSP project. As such, we plan on loading the entire n=18 PSP range if we continue to be unable to contact anyone.

This is not ideal. Although we can always pull candidates out, I'd much rather coordinate the reservations with PSP, but that appears to be impossible.

If anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Michael Goetz
PrimeGrid

So is this an ultimate? Is PrimeGrid going to still another mersenneforum effort? PrimeGrid stoled RieselSieve and Riesel/S Base 5. I think you guys should say to your community that you come here as a thieves and grab projects. At least that would be humble. Don't you have a bunch of projects to take care off? I don't think PrimeGrid has the sufficient CPU power to hundle all projects you are involved in. PrimeGrid is biting off much more than it can chew.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;391354]So is this an ultimate? Is PrimeGrid going to still another mersenneforum effort? PrimeGrid stoled RieselSieve and Riesel Base 5. I think you guys should say to your community that you come here as a thieves and grab projects. At least that would be humble. Don't you have a bunch of projects to take care off? I don't think PrimeGrid has the sufficient CPU power to hundle all projects you are involved in. PrimeGrid is biting off much more than it can chew.[/QUOTE]

There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding here. For many years, PrimeGrid and the Prime Sierpinski Project have been collaborating by sharing the work and coordinating reservations. We're not trying to steal anything. We're trying to reserve the next range of candidates -- and PSP seems to have vanished.

Perhaps it's a language problem, but we're not issuing an ultimatum in any sense. We're asking for your help!

We've been trying to contact Citrix and/or ltd for a while have have gotten no response. The PSP servers are down. Time is running short. If anyone has any info, or is able to contact them, we'd really appreciate your assistance.

If it turns out that PSP is down permanently, we'll continue the project on our own -- but we all hope that's not what happens.

Thanks again,
Mike

Carlos,

Criticism has to be constructive. What do you suggest instead? Do nothing? Michael is trying to reach admins of a dead server; what is wrong with that?

Michael,

They seem to come here very rarely. ltd last visited 7 weeks ago, Citrix - more than a week. You may want to try to send them PM - they will get an email notification (if they didn't disable it). Otherwise, it sounds like the proverbial voice of one calling in the wilderness. They are not here to hear it.

[QUOTE=Batalov;391356]Michael,

They seem to come here very rarely. ltd last visited 7 weeks ago, Citrix - more than a week. You may want to try to send them PM - they will get an email notification (if they didn't disable it). Otherwise, it sounds like the proverbial voice of one calling in the wilderness. They are not here to hear it.[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, we've PM'd and emailed them and have received no response. Posting here is a last ditch attempt to reach them.

Mike

I'll attempt to email them.

[QUOTE=Batalov;391360]I'll attempt to email them.[/QUOTE]

Thank you!

Okay, we've heard from lars (ltd).

It's unclear right now when the PSP server can be turned back on. Hopefully it won't be long. According to Lars, it may be anywhere from a couple of days to never. I'm hoping for "a couple of days". :)

If I get any more information I'll let you know.

If it's not possible to get at the reservation information before we have to load more work, does anyone know where the leading edge of PSP was before the server went down? If we're going to be crunching PSP "blind", I'd prefer to do it above where anyone else has a reservation. Right now we're crunching n=17M to n=18M.

Mike

P.S., If this is a worst case scenario and there's no way to recover the PSP server, we do have all the sieve information (the sieving was done at PrimeGrid.) It will therefore be possible to continue the PSP project without creating new sieve files. However, we don't have any record of which numbers were crunched at PSP -- only those that were crunched at PrimeGrid. That would be a problem.

Sorry for not answering earlier.
The PSP server at the moment is locked by the service provider and I fear this means that it was hacked again and therefore locked out of the internet by the provider after noticing.
As soon as possible hopefully early next week but from my workload I fear more to the end of it I will see what can be done. There should be at least a way to recover all the results from that machine even if it was hacked.

What I know is that there were no tests handed out to the PSP server above the tests done by primegrid so far. So there will not be any duplication if primegrid continues above 18M.

Other known facts:
Everything below 8.5M has validated results that means there are two tests with identical residues.
Below 11M everything is double checked but there are around 100 tests which have no matching residues and will need a triple check.
Tests above 11M which are not done by primegrid only have a first pass test so far.
I hope we can recover everything so that we will not have any wasted work.

If the machine was really hacked I will do everything I can to recover all the data.
But as I will have not enough time to handle setting up a new clean server (and maintain it to stay secure) during 2015 (far too much work and travel around the world) I will give all results to primegrid and stop the PSP project server if it was really hacked.

I found out that the machine is really compromised in a way that can only be fixed by a complete reinstall.
So the next step will be to discuss with the service provider how and when I can get the machine back online for some days to extract all the data.

So primegrid shold continue above 18M for now and as soon as I have the data extracted the gaps below can be filled.

Thanks, Lars. Anything you can provide will be helpful.

If you (or anyone) has the earliest residues from PSP work, prior to what was run on your PRPNet server, that would be helpful as well. It's nice to have all the results available in one place.

A large majority (but not all) of the tests above ~n=4M appear to have been done on PrimeGrid, and possibly above ~n=2M, so we have many of those results, but we have nothing below ~n=2m.

If we really have a worst case scenario I have at least some older DB exports at home.( data is stored on my NAS and on a separate PC so they should be save)
So in any case we will have all known factors for k/n pairs as there was no sieving after that backup and we will have most of the residues.

I had made some additional backups but never copied them from the server to my home machine. (The virtual server seemed to be save enough and the backups were only done in case that something would destroy the intergrity of the DB to have some fallback data).

[QUOTE=Batalov;391356]
They seem to come here very rarely. ltd last visited 7 weeks ago, Citrix - more than a week. You may want to try to send them PM - they will get an email notification (if they didn't disable it). Otherwise, it sounds like the proverbial voice of one calling in the wilderness. They are not here to hear it.[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I did not check my Private messages. I had visited the forum several times in the last week, but did not log in- so I did not know about the PMs.

Regarding the PRPnet server-- is there enough interest to keep it going at this point or should we move everything to PrimeGrid? Lars, can this be hosted reliably?

Happy New Year to all!:smile:

Edit:-
Not sure if this helps
[url]http://98.139.236.92/search/srpcache?p=www.psp-project.de%2Fcand.html&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=mozilla&ei=UTF-8&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=www.psp-project.de%2fcand.html&d=4989645250235717&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=YhiKbIiU2SLdB3hzmXVHFGcPoeu42K9a&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=7huLzN8BfUZdohVnyqcJ5g--[/url]

[QUOTE=Citrix;391428]Sorry, I did not check my Private messages. I had visited the forum several times in the last week, but did not log in- so I did not know about the PMs.

Regarding the PRPnet server-- is there enough interest to keep it going at this point or should we move everything to PrimeGrid? Lars, can this be hosted reliably?

Happy New Year to all!:smile:

Edit:-
Not sure if this helps
[URL="http://98.139.236.92/search/srpcache?p=www.psp-project.de%2Fcand.html&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=mozilla&ei=UTF-8&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=www.psp-project.de%2fcand.html&d=4989645250235717&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=YhiKbIiU2SLdB3hzmXVHFGcPoeu42K9a&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=7huLzN8BfUZdohVnyqcJ5g--"]http://98.139.236.92/search/srpcache?p=www.psp-project.de%2Fcand.html&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=mozilla&ei=UTF-8&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=www.psp-project.de%2fcand.html&d=4989645250235717&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=YhiKbIiU2SLdB3hzmXVHFGcPoeu42K9a&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=7huLzN8BfUZdohVnyqcJ5g--[/URL][/QUOTE]
Well if you have still only ~8 people outside of BOINC running work, it would only make sense to really hand it over. It isn't like they are making loads of money off of it or anything and the information is still going where intended. [url]http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=19447[/url]

I'm not sure why pinhodecarlos has such an issue with PrimeGrid as it brings many more contributors than the stand alone clients have ever done. Maybe it is an anti-BOINC thing, but that just seems silly to me. If it is getting more done, why is it bad?

You are too young to understand PrimeGrid background of stealing projects from here.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;392450]You are too young to understand PrimeGrid background of stealing projects from here.[/QUOTE]
And are you too old to explain?

Basically I was running sieve and LLR for rieselbase 5 with a bunch of friends and suddenly PrimeGrid stole the project without warning mersenneforum users. Also we sieved a lot for rieselsieve project leaded by Lee. Another project stolen by PrimeGrid.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;392455]Basically I was running sieve and LLR for rieselbase 5 with a bunch of friends and suddenly PrimeGrid stole the project without warning mersenneforum users[/QUOTE]

Really? I wasn't an admin back then, but it seems to me that PrimeGrid's getting involved with Siepinski/Riesel base 5 (what we call SR5) was a collaboration between the CRUS admins and the PrimeGrid admins.

If there's any doubt about this really being a collaboration, please take a look here:

[url]http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=14591[/url]

There's no ambiguity.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;392455]Basically I was running sieve and LLR for rieselbase 5 with a bunch of friends and suddenly PrimeGrid stole the project without warning mersenneforum users. Also we sieved a lot for rieselsieve project leaded by Lee. Another project stolen by PrimeGrid.[/QUOTE]
Well... whether you define what they did as "stole" or not doesn't seem to be the case in this situation if they are coming here asking for additional blocks and are pretty much the only ones seriously doing it. They in this case are not doing anything without warning. So, regardless of this group you refer to feeling jaded in some way, they are at least doing what they can to make a serious effort in something that many has seen as "dead". If it weren't for PrimeGrid and DC-Vault, I would have never even heard of these projects. I have been volunteering my systems with PrimeGrid since 2008.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;391354]So is this an ultimate? Is PrimeGrid going to still another mersenneforum effort? PrimeGrid stoled RieselSieve and Riesel/S Base 5. I think you guys should say to your community that you come here as a thieves and grab projects. At least that would be humble. Don't you have a bunch of projects to take care off? I don't think PrimeGrid has the sufficient CPU power to hundle all projects you are involved in. PrimeGrid is biting off much more than it can chew.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;392450]You are too young to understand PrimeGrid background of stealing projects from here.[/QUOTE]
See: [url]http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=13901[/url]

Basically after boink came along most of these smaller projects died.

They had an enormous number of minions who contributed unknowingly, which sort of wrecked the projects from an enthusiasts stand point.

Think of them like the Borg, another reference of the time these projects were great...

I have some background data on zip disks and CD's most everything sieved below 50M.
Not sure if this comment is still relative.

Problem is no one is really supporting the project... is primegrid?

-J

[QUOTE=VJS;416594]Basically after boink came along most of these smaller projects died.

They had an enormous number of minions who contributed unknowingly, which sort of wrecked the projects from an enthusiasts stand point.

Think of them like the Borg, another reference of the time these projects were great...

I have some background data on zip disks and CD's most everything sieved below 50M.
Not sure if this comment is still relative.

Problem is no one is really supporting the project... is primegrid?

-J[/QUOTE]

The Borg, eh? Well, BOINC *does* come out of the box complete with assimilator.

PSP is alive and well on PrimeGrid. As I'm sure you know, for years now there's been an allegiance between PSP and PrimeGrid whereby we cooperated on attempting to prove the Prime Siepinski Problem. While PSP's own PRPNet server is no longer available, the search continues on PrimeGrid's BOINC server. We intend to continue the search on our own server until a prime is found for each of the remaining k's. In other words, yes, we're supporting the project. The leading edge of the search is now n=18,289,479

[QUOTE=AG5BPilot;416600]As I'm sure you know, for years now there's been an [B]allegiance[/B] between ...[/QUOTE]

Perhaps you meant to say "alliance"? :smile:

[QUOTE=axn;416602]Perhaps you meant to say "alliance"? :smile:[/QUOTE]

Perhaps I did. :)

I'll blame it on the spell checker. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Thanks!