Distributed computing

I'm fascinated by the concept of distributed computing and the ease with which powerful systems can be constructed relatively cheap.

The first distributed project I got involved with was GIMPS, a project searching for Mersenne primes ie. primes of the form 2^P-1. Incidentally they recently found the 39th known Mersenne prime, 2^13,466,917-1, a number of over 4 million digits. It's only the 39th known since GIMPS haven't confirmed all smaller mersenne numbers composite yet.

I still have a few computers participating in this, mainly because I haven't finished my Windows client for my current project yet, though that's finally starting to grow.

While having my machines working on GIMPS, I started getting interested in other number-theoretical projects, one of while was Conrad Curry's NFSNET, which was a non-automated distributed project for factorising large composite numbers using the Special Number Field Sieve (link to follow).
In this project I participated in factoring most of the numbers done by the project until it's demise when Curry apparently dropped off the edge of the earth.

After these I started sieving numbers on my own using a primitive client/server setup I started working on back in June in order to split the NFSNET work over multiple machines.
First ones done where 17,119+ and 38,91+ finished Nov 26, 1999 and 21,119+ finished Jan 4, 2000 (my birthday:) which Conrad Curry did the linear algebra and square root steps on.
After this time, I've been doing all steps on my own, and the client/server setup has been slowly maturing. In the last couple of months I've been slowly developing a new version of the protocol, which should make it easier to code for, which should mean that I'll finally get a Windows version done of the sieving client, hopefully giving rise to a self contained binary for Linux as well.