Better GIMPS Startup

No, not GIMP, but GIMPS: the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.

I’d been starting mprime from rc.local, but this time I used crontab, as suggested in that thread, to reduce the program’s privileges.

Start the crontab editor:

crontab -e

Then add this line:

@reboot ( /opt/Primenet/mprime & )

It starts every time the box boots and run until you hit shutdown, which is exactly the way things should work.

Power dissipation looks like this:

• Idle: 40 W
• mprime running: 88 W

They estimate an additional 40 W, which comes out slightly low for this box. Their system info dump looks like this:

CPU Information:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E8400  @ 3.00GHz
CPU speed: 2992.40 MHz, 2 cores
CPU features: Prefetch, SSE, SSE2, SSE4
L1 cache size: 32 KB
L2 cache size: 6 MB