In the coming days we will be introducing a new number field application. This one will target degree 7 fields (called septics). The current best bound is 5E6, and this app will increase that to 200E6. This means it will find all degree 7 fields whose discriminant is bounded by 200E6.

Here is some additional information:
1. This search is expected to run for only 5 to 6 months (but could take longer).
2. It will run side-by-side with the current decic app.
3. It will only support the 64bit Windows and 64 bit Linux platforms.

Is it just me or is the new app more demanding/efficient than the original one? It's making more heat :d

Not like I am complaining but I am just curious to know, so that I can switch between tasks during the hotter days.

I didn't do anything special, so I assume the two apps should have about the same efficiency.

Although the average run time of the Septic app is longer than the Decic app, it has a much smaller variance. As a result, you won't see the clusters of really quick WUs. The quick Decic clusters could lead to the kind of inefficiencies you speak of, but they should be rare so I doubt you would actually notice that.

I don't know about efficiency, but the Septic app is drawing a little more current than the Decic one and that means a bit more heat. I'm guessing it will vary from one brand of CPU to another, but on my machines it looks to be about 10% more.

That's interesting. Would using on-chip cache produce more heat than going to RAM? The Septic app has a much smaller memory footprint and could reside mostly on-chip. Wouldn't that mean less idle time waiting for data to go to/from RAM and hence increase application "efficiency"?

I believe on-chip cache should run much faster than running out of RAM. And yes, would run warmer.
By the way, for me at least the little bit of extra heat is no problem.

there is only this one batch am i right?
so this application is nearly finished?

Yes, we have just about 5% left to go! And then it's back to the decic app full time.

that sounds great :D
thanks for your fast answer

The last of the Septic tasks have been sent out, and its now back to the decic fields.

It will take several more weeks for the last of the septics to trickle in, at which time I will report back here with the final results. In the meantime, I continue to update the field counts in the database weekly.

Thanks to all the crunchers who made this calculation possible!

The septic search is now complete. See this thread for details.

I still need to update the field counts in the database. I will do that in about a week (the update script operates on archived database files which will be available in a week).