Mersenne Comic Strip
 

...If you remember the day you saw this Ripley's comic strip (January 29, 2004): [URL]http://comics.com/ripleys_believe_it_or_not/?DateAfter=2004-01-29&DateBefore=2004-01-29&Order=d.DateStrip+DESC&PerPage=50&Search=&x=13&y=9[/URL]

[quote=roger;122603]You win the lottery and splurge on several Crays :grin: Now you can finally catch up to the guru's of the search! Also, you are now warmer because of your (computer's) effort![/quote]

No kidding - I was actually daydreaming about getting a decent oct- or 16- or 32-core intel machine (after a lottery wining) for being the first to get a 100M mersenne prime number ;).

...if you read "[URL="http://www.networkcomputing.in/Supercomputer-as-a-service-001Apr009.aspx"]Supercomputer as a service[/URL]" and wonder how much it'd cost and how good it is at finding primes. (guilty...not that I'd actually buy time on it...)

...you read about cloud computing on Amazon, and start checking how many virtual CPUs would balance your actual electric bill... :cry:

Luigi

Ah, you did that too. I think ECC is a system for providing computers to companies whose marketing people want them to over-provision for peak load and whose finance people don't want to pay for the too-big cluster; using it for jobs that actually load the machines 24/7 is silly.

Renting a 16G machine for the time taken just to build one matrix which might need 16G of memory costs of the order of the price of upgrading one of my machines to 16G.

Power costs are an issue, but I don't think much of the current work on power-efficient computing works for the 24/7 compute-farm model; being able to do nothing using 100W rather than 300W is very nice for those people who've over-provisioned and have computers that do nothing.

(IME a computer lasts three years, and uses electricity costing one third of a computer a year; so I'd be prepared to pay twice as much for one that was powered by an inbuilt perpetual-motion machine and used no electricity at all)

Q9400S is getting there, but it's £120 more than Q9400, which buys about 1200kW-hours over say a 24000-hour lifetime ... which means it would have to save 50W to break even, and it only saves 30W.

[quote=mdettweiler;145991]Of course, if you're [I]really[/I] addicted, you'd leave out 2 of the SSD's, both of the hard drives, Vista Ultimate (replace it with Linux instead), the GPU's and the fancy monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers and headphones, and use all that money to pick up one or two more machines for even more crunch power. :grin: (Removing all the goodies that don't add raw computing power will also serve to deter you from using the machine for other things, which would sap too much CPU time.) :wink:[/quote]

yeah f**k that graphics card - you don't need it for prime95.

You use your networked 386 to d/l opera and run it on your machines with all graphics off to say cycles.

...you buy an iPhone so that you can browse the web without stealing cycles from your computers.
...you then realize that you might be able to port Prime95 to the iPhone and become obsessed with making it run Prime95 at as good a speed is possible on its hardware.
...then you overclock the iPhone.

You port a factoring programme to work on your car's CD/DVD player.

You hack GM's On-Star service and get all of those CD and DVD players to do TF's.

[quote=Uncwilly;173458]You hack GM's On-Star service and get all of those CD and DVD players to do TF's.[/quote]Transcript:

"ring... ring... On-Star"

"M1234567889: no factor to 2^89
M1234567891 has a factor: 391113896243211827364532113"

"On-Star thanks you. (* click *)"