Thursday, September 01, 2022

A million-digit Leyland prime (power interruption)


This morning, a 23-minute power interruption allowed a couple of Toronto Hydro employees to do some maintenance work on a close-to-my-home transformer. I have all 18 computers (104 processes currently working on my million-digit Leyland prime search) on battery back-up units but the amount of time here was just long enough to shut down seven of them (39 processes). Another 5 to 10 minutes might have killed them all.

By early afternoon I had saved the output of the interrupted programs and reinitialized their new search ranges. Three of the seven affected computers were the ones that were taking 18.5 hours per candidate in my May 27 reality check, so I installed new (differing) operating systems on those machines, hoping for a speed improvement. I won't know for a couple of days if that will pan out.

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