After nearly three years of work, at first for factoring the 512-bit RSA keys used for validation in TI-Z80 and TI-68k graphing calculators, but soon repurposed for factoring integers of mathematical interest, RSALS is currently being moved to the larger NFS@Home grid, before being shut down in the next few weeks, after the current numbers (and perhaps a couple easy ones, to pick up the slack ?).
Clients connected to RSALS have participated in the factoring of about 400 fairly large composite integers, helping a number of projects interested in those factorizations. Thanks so much for your trillions of CPU cycles over those three years :-)
RSALS was the first BOINC grid using the Number Field Sieve algorithm, the most efficient known algorithm for large integers. The NFS@Home grid was created shortly after RSALS by Greg Childers, a.k.a "frmky", Associate Professor of Physics at California State Fullerton University, well-known in the integer factoring community and aiming at factorizations larger than RSALS could reach through the sole "14e" siever program it used, by using the larger "15e", "16e" and other sievers.
For almost three years, RSALS and NFS@Home were used in a complementary way; but the time has come to make these a single, more powerful grid with a single set of programs, rather than spending time installing RSALS to a newer server (the current one being expensive and under-powered) and importing NFS@Home's sievers into RSALS.
Thanks again to our BOINC clients, our post-processers, and the integer factoring community. We hope to see you on NFS@Home soon :-)
NOTE: if you really don't want the NFS@Home WUs to use more RAM than the current RSALS WUs do, you'll have to make sure, in the preferences of your account on NFS@Home ( http://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/prefs.php?subset=project ), that "lasieved" is the only enabled siever.
For a more detailed version of this post, see the MersenneForum announcement.
Lionel Debroux & squalyl for RSALS.
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Thanks for running a fairly smooth project. Your reasons for moving to the larger NFS@Home make sense. I wish you well in the transition.
On your open question of RSALS credits; I think they should stay where they are. RSALS and NFS@Home are different projects and the credits are not related. If users decide to move to NFS@Home and run the tasks you add to the NFS@Home queue then they will start earning credits under the NFS@Home name.
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squalylVolunteer moderator
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Hello,
the boinc operations will close but I plan to keep the site opened on a simpler web server, so that all data remains available.
Regards and thanks for computing with us.
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Good luck with your future endeavors. :)
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