Looks like the project averaged about one new Mersenne Prime per year for 1996-2009, and then only 4 hits for 2010-2018 with none since 2018.
Obviously the tflops::hit difficulty ratio is ramping up as the numbers get larger, but I can't help wondering if the cryptocurrency craze dampened their work rate.
They're reporting 78,012 tflops of work done today, but my five minutes of investigation wasn't enough to find a historical chart of tflops/day and five minutes is about the limit of my curiosity on this matter for now.
When the project started, CPU frequency scaling wasn't a thing, so CPUs would run at full speed (and full power draw) 100% of the time. If you weren't making maximal use of the CPU, any remaining capacity would go to waste. Distributed computing projects could make use of that remaining capacity.
Today, CPUs are built with power efficiency in mind, and will attempt to scale down rapidly when not fully in use. Thus there is no longer such a thing as "spare CPU time". Any time spent on distributed computing projects is paid for in electricity costs. Some choose to continue anyway, but many have been disincentivized.
It may have been replaced by a cryptocurrency indeed, for there was PrimeCoin, one of the very few that actually did something that was both productive and unprofitable (critically important for the economics of mining) with its mining cycles, and that is look for prime numbers. Although I don't remember if these were Mersenne Primes. It was one of the very earliest altcoins and by its nature was CPU bound which made it unpopular with large scale mining farms, but extremely popular with CPU cycle thieves working in clueless corporate and educational IT departments.
oxygen_crisis|2 years ago
Obviously the tflops::hit difficulty ratio is ramping up as the numbers get larger, but I can't help wondering if the cryptocurrency craze dampened their work rate.
They're reporting 78,012 tflops of work done today, but my five minutes of investigation wasn't enough to find a historical chart of tflops/day and five minutes is about the limit of my curiosity on this matter for now.
jl6|2 years ago
Today, CPUs are built with power efficiency in mind, and will attempt to scale down rapidly when not fully in use. Thus there is no longer such a thing as "spare CPU time". Any time spent on distributed computing projects is paid for in electricity costs. Some choose to continue anyway, but many have been disincentivized.
ChainOfFools|2 years ago