The Goal

The ECM project has been up and running for some time. It's goal is to factor large composite numbers using the ECM method. ECM is a highly efficient method of finding prime factors in the 35-55 digit range.

Additional Information

• For details on this project, see http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/ecmnet.html.
• More details on my client/server program are available here

The software
The software available here contains a client-server wrapper for running the ECM search program. It is designed in such a way that it can be installed once, and then ignored. It will quietly use otherwise wasted resources on your machine to perform its search. There is virtually no impact on other processes that may be running on your machine.

The most recent package available is version 2.0k. It was released on June 21, 1999. Source is included in this file.

Getting started
To get started, do the following:

• Download the client/server wrapper program. The version here will work on Windows 95/98/NT machines. Source code is provided if you have a unix based box.
• Create a working directory (C:\ecmnet recommended), and unzip the contents of the downloade zip into that directory
• Customize the ecmclient.cfg (or ecmclientsvc.cfg file if you have WinNT) in the client subdirectory. There are comments in the file to assist with this customization.
• Set the file to start automatically. Put a link in your startup folder, or if you have Windows NT, type "ecmclientsvc.exe -install" to set up the service

Where to connect to
Paul Leyland has volunteered to host a server. Its address is red.cam.uk.eu.microsoft.com (port 8194). The machine may change, but please point your client at this server (check back here for updates if it stops working).

Your own server
It's possible to run your own. There are a couple of reasons you might want to do this. FIrst, you may not want to work on the fame composites as the larger group. Second, you may want to limit outbound connections (firewall issues, for example). If you want to run your own server, see the detail page and the server subdirectory in the downloaded zip file.

Factors found so far
I found a factor with this setup even before I released it. The following file is an up-to-date list of everything found that was turned in so far. factors.html.