From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Sun Jan 13 2002 - 00:26:14 MST
A thought occurred to me today. Scott Kurowski is the
guy who started the company (unfortunately named
Entropia) that hosts the GIMPS project. He does the
GIMPS project without charge, as a demonstration
of his company's product which is parallel computing
software.
Today I finally realized that Entropia has created
something of great value, not just discovering 4
Mersenne primes. The GIMPS software does a
sanity check every couple hours and stores the
intermediate results, so that if the power goes
down or the computer crashes, the software
resumes at the last sanity check. If the computer
makes a bit error, the software makes a note of it
and returns to the last intermediate result. A typical
bit error rate is one or two per year.
When the test is finished and the exponent is returned,
one of the pieces of information returned is the error
log. There are a couple dozen different processors that
are in that enormous database, and all the various
incarnations of each, the different clock speeds, the
math coprocessors, the various operating systems, etc.
Scott Kurowski is sitting on a database that can
accurately answer the question of which company
makes the best microprocessors. He has tons of
data to show which ones crash the most, which
make the most bit errors, etc. Is not such a
database of tremendous value to Motorola,
Intel, AMD, and perhaps Microsloth? spike
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