I was surprised to come home from vacation and see so many new participants. I only told a handful of people, but apparently the word got around. But this is good! Several issues have surfaced, but nothing too serious. Just a few general comments:
1. There can be large variations in run times between different work units. Each work unit represents a single instance of an outer loop variable, and it is hard to determine a priori how long the inner code will take for a given value of this variable. I have seen run times as long as 12 hours.
2. The windows version reports memory leakage whenever the executable is stopped. I believe this message is wrong, but it is annoying and I will try to find the cause of it.
3. The progress bar is not being implemented correctly. This causes the progress to appear stuck at 0% for the entire duration of the workunit.

As you are exporting the xml stats, I did add them to the Free-DC stats pages, which you can see here.

http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=proj&proj=num

Was quite a coincidence, as I added them on thursday whilst I was staying out in Tempe, Az just a few blocks down from ASU (Courtyard Marriott on Ash Ave :) )

Back home in NC now though.

Good luck with the project!

Bok

I was surprised to come home from vacation and see so many new participants. I only told a handful of people, but apparently the word got around. But this is good!

You ain't seen nothin' yet. I've been crunching for the ABC@home project, another math oriented BOINC project, for a few years. They're just about finished their search so I've posted a message in their forum to invite volunteers to join this project. Also there is a new message on the BOINC dev forums mentioning this project.

Are you prepared for the onslaught of our mighty mighty BOINC "supercomputer"? We've left many an unprepared project bleeding in the ditch, disks exploded, data bases fried, too many connections, tires flat, coconuts blown clean off the palm tree. Test4Theory@home was our most recent "victim". They had 6000 new volunteers join in the space of about 3 days after a few articles about their project appeared in some online magazines, blogs, etc. The poor buggers didn't know what hit them. Took them 2 weeks to recover.

Do you want more advertising or do you want the volunteer numbers to ramp up slow and easy? I doubt you'll get 6000 new crunchers in 3 days but... who knows for sure.

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BOINC FAQ Service
Official BOINC wiki
Installing BOINC on Linux

lol. We are almost ready for the "onslaught". We are working out a couple more issues with the app and hunting down some odd error messages in the apache logs. After that, the only question is if our server can handle 6000+ new users (we are using a single server host).

What is the expected life time of the project? What I'm after is an idea of whether we are looking at a college term, a college year, an ongoing thing. That kind of thing.

What is the expected life time of the project? What I'm after is an idea of whether we are looking at a college term, a college year, an ongoing thing. That kind of thing.

I expect the project to go on for many years. The current search is finding all degree 10 imprimitive fields with discriminant less than a given bound. After that we start searching for fields ramified at particular sets of primes. Since there are infinitely many primes, there are un unlimited number of searches. After we've done enough of those, we can then move to primitive fields or fields of higher degree. Most likely the server hardware will give out before we run out of work.

Eric