primegrid – An Autonomous Agent

Category: primegrid

The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics – Marcus du Sautoy

On January 23, 2013

In alan turing, boinc, book, education, Godel, math, primegrid, riemann hypothesis

A friend recommended that I read The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics. This book, by Marcus du Sautoy, provides a well written account of the endeavor to solve the Riemann Hypothesis. Here is a brief YouTube explanation of the hypothesis. Don’t forget to help find more primes at PrimeGrid, a BOINC project.

BOINC

By anautonomousagent

On December 30, 2012

In astronomy, boinc, computer, cuda, einstein, gpugrid, gtx 580, milky way, primegrid, seti, space, website

When I had a Windows 95 PC back in the late 1990’s I would run the SETI@HOME program. As most people know this is a way to help search for ET. I can not remember exactly but I believe it took at least a day of continuous processing on my IBM Pentium MMX 166 MHz processor to complete one work unit.
About a year ago I rediscovered my childhood urge to find ET and decided to run SETI once more. I discovered that SETI now runs through a program call BOINC. More information on BOINC here.

BOINC, as I understand it, has enormous potential; especially with CUDA. I bought the CUDA enabled GTX 580 to create a monster gaming rig (See post on my gaming computer). When I run SETI, the GTX 580 completes the task in about 7 minutes. Just incredible. My Core 2 Duo laptop took 7 hours.