Well, I just got M40 assigned to myself...

[GP2]

On the server, some first-time testing exponents mysteriously appear "available" but stuck. That is, they show up in the "available" column, but never get assigned.

Each time a 0.1M range completes, there's always a few stuck-available exponents left over... in the 21.3M range there were 15. I clear them out by adding them to my worktodo.ini and contacting the server to get them assigned to me, then using the manual release form to release them back, whereupon they start getting assigned in the normal fashion.

M40 was added to cleared.txt today with "P" status and 0000000000000000 residue... however the 20.9M line in summary.txt showed 1 new stuck-available exponent. On a hunch, I managed to get M40 assigned to me (to the phantom machine GP2/ColdStorage)... just making sure it doesn't get assigned to someone for real.

[nfortino]

What is the cause of exponents getting stuck?

[GP2]

Originally posted by nfortino
What is the cause of exponents getting stuck?

It was discussed in some earlier threads:
http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthr...&threadid=1246
http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthr...=&threadid=686

The summary.txt report only reports the count of stuck-available exponents, not their identities. But I can identify them because they're not in the weekly data files or in status.txt or cleared.txt or in the list of manual ranges that George provided to me, and the count matches. Naturally, this only works after the leading edge of first-time checking has already moved on to the next 0.1M range.