NFSNETthe first year and the next year

Paul LeylandMicrosoft Research Ltd

and a cast of hundreds. paul@nfsnet.org

NFSNET: the first year

Really, the first 18 months.

What is NFSNET? A collaboration to factor integers

by distributing the Number Field Sieve over a number of computers.

A harness to coordinate the CWI suite of NFS programs.

A web site, http://www.nfsnet.org

The management team Don Leclair

web site, contributor liaison. Richard Wackerbarth

software repository, data warehouse, server maintenance.

Paul LeylandLord High Everything Else :-)

The developers CWI — NFS suite. Richard Wackerbarth — server &

client. Don Leclair — web site, progress

statistics. Jeff Gilchrist — Windows® GUI. Chris Card — server. Paul Leyland — docs, code fragments.

The contributors July 2002

3 people, ~50 cpus Jan 2003

~15 people, ~60 cpus July 2003

~40 people, ~200 cpus November 2003

~45 people, ~120 cpus

http://www.nfsnet.org

Overview screen

Users screen

Computers screen

Protocol overview All c/s communications over HTTP. User downloads code and installs. nfsnetinit sets up config data. nfsnetclient contacts initial server to

register user, guid, etc. server redirects client to task allocator. while(1) {server allocates task;

client processes task, returns results; }

More protocol details Projects broken into sub-projects,

called “pools”. IDLE task if server runs out of work,

or if client seems badly broken. REDIRECT task to move client to a

new server or a new pool. Resilience, load balancing, easy to

sieve several integers concurrently.

A background project

The Work Unit, or WU F = #prime ideals in factor bases Feff = 0.29211F + 4247300 L = length of each line 1 WU = L x Feff

x 10-18

1 GHz-day ~ 2 WU

Results: overviewNumber Factorization Start End Days 2757-1 C213 = P79∙P134 31/7/03 2/12/03 124 2713-1 C171 = P56∙P115 6/7/03 1/9/03 5710227-1 C212 = P72∙P141 28/4/03 23/8/03 11712197-1 C212 = P70∙P143 26/3/03 20/5/03 55 5298+1 C189 = P50∙P139 24/2/03 26/4/03 6112178+1 C145 = P69∙P76 16/2/03 20/3/03 32 2673-1 C151 = P59∙P92 29/1/03 17/2/03 1911197+1 C161 = P76∙P85 2/1/03 25/2/03 54 5289+1 C156 = P62∙P95 7/12/02 4/2/03 59 6257-1 C173 = P58∙P115 4/11/02 3/1/03 60W(668) C204 = P55∙P149 6/9/02 12/11/02 67

Results: resourcesNumber bits WU A/Fl/Fa/LPB(M) matrix time 2757-1 757 13746 90/50/50/1000 7.52M 635h 2713-1 713 3333 54/50/50/500 5.44M 222h10227-1 754 10055 90/50/50/1000 7.93M 468h12197-1 706 3415 54/50/50/500 5.14M 177h 5298+1 692 2937 54/50/50/500 4.90M 158h12178+1 638 1699 36/40/40/500 3.72M 79h 2673-1 673 4214 36/40/50/500 3.56M 121h11197+1 682 4603 36/40/50/500 4.88M 120h 5289+1 671 3744 36/40/50/500 4.38M 101h 6257-1 664 3255 36/40/50/500 4.23M 118hW(668) 677 2976 36/50/50/537 5.66M 177h

Work Units against size in bits

y = 0.1066e0.0154x

R2 = 0.7792

1000

10000

100000

600 650 700 750 800 850Bits

WU

NFSNET: the next year

We hope!

Projects in progress

N Bits Comp Start Est. WU

5302+1 701 C187 1/10/03 3500

2811-1 811 C239 13/10/03 80000

ECM to p50 level on 2811-1 beforehand

Enhancements planned Client enhancements:

Off-line clients (now in beta). Various sievers, e.g. lattice. GNFS polynomial searching. GUI for Unix-like systems

Server Enhancements: Hierarchical server network. Data structures in XML for portability and

flexibility. All meta-data in SQL database.

Enhancements, continued Web site enhancements:

Richer content. On-line user registration. Multiple project display Historical data display. Support for teams.

Massive recruitment!

Lessons learned HTTP and web site => quick time to market. On-line requirement is too restrictive. Lots of time must be allocated to PR,

documentation and user-support. Combining open source, CWI code and MSR

resources gives rise to hard problems. 800-bit SNFS straightforward with current

technology. 900-bit SNFS expected to be straightforward.