Distributed factoring

[bunbun]

At my school I spent some time writing a distributed factoring algorthm. Basically the way it worked was to take some number P, find its square root, Q, and then break Q into N equal jobs and send those jobs to the clients and wait for the replies. The clients would only test odd numbers as factors and then if it found a factor it would if requested from the server test it to see if it is prime. Then the client sends all info it found back to the server and the server compiles the input to make the list of factors(or prime factors) of P. My approach seems like it could be make better. Any ideas?

Thanks
Bunbun

 

[networkman]

I'm thinking you may want to be posing this question over in the Software and Applications forum, because most of the folks here are running clients designed/programmed by the operators of each of the Distributed Computing projects.

It sounds to me like you're writing your own DC app - I don't think you're gonna find as much help here as you might be expecting. Might also try the Operating Systems forum too; it's been my experience that most of the folks familiar and comfortable with Linux also tend to be decent programmers too, so you might have better luck there too.

 

[bunbun]

Sounds cool, thanks for the suggesions.

--Bunbun

 

[Ken g6]

If you want to get into the math of DC more deeply, I've found MersenneForum is a great place for that.

If you really want some esoteric math, there's something called Distributed Pollard Rho I think might work better. I've only seen algorithm descriptions of it for solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem, but all DLP solvers seem to do factoring as well. It was also used in an old DC project called ECCp-109, where I think it was essentially factoring a number.