[NumberFields@home] New Faster Apps Coming Soon

New optimized versions of the GetDecics app have been discussed in other threads, but I thought it best to start a new thread.

First, a thank you to Alperen for optimizing the current apps. Yes, he used Claude, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't have the experience required or the time to learn the AVX tricks that were used here. So without Alperen and Claude, this probably never would have happened.

I have spent many hours going through the new code. The original code was basically left untouched, and the change was in the addition of a new subroutine that pre-filters the polynomials prior to the normal processing chain. This leaves just the one subroutine that needs validation. From a theoretical perspective, the method is sound. The method can be decomposed into 2 parts:

1. The first part was a simple trick (I wish I had seen this myself!) that allows us to deal with the polynomial discriminant modulo a small set of primes. This eliminates the need for the multi-precision integers that were growing to ~1000 bits, and gives the first speed improvement. This was simple enough I could independently code it up myself using Pari's built-in functions. In some offline tests I was seeing a speed improvement of between 2 and 3, just for this simple change.

2. The second improvement was in the coding of the resultant modulo q. This was essentially done in parallel using AVX2, which allows resultants to be computed for several primes simultaneously. This is the part that is very tricky and hard for me to follow. I welcome any expert in this kind of optimization to look at the code. Alperen has made it public here:
https://github.com/alplix/passiflora

So the method in general is sound, but the second part was hard for me to validate. For this reason, I will use sufficient testing to validate the new apps. The idea is to test each new app version on ~1000 old cases which can be taken as truth. This will be done using the "testDecics" app that was recently created. When an app is deemed good, it will be transitioned into an official app.

I will be creating a new app called fastGetDecics where the new validated apps will go. This will still allow me to keep the results separate. It will also allow me to create new WUs for the fast apps that will not put a burden on the server, while retaining older style WUs for the legacy apps. This will give me time to test and migrate the fast apps in pieces rather than all at once. App versions for the original GetDecics will be deprecated once the corresponding fast version has been deemed trustworthy.

View article · Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:24:26 +0000

[SRBase] base R235 Megaprime

vaughan, a member of the team BOINC@AUSTRALIA found a megaprime for base R235.
The prime 3788*235^455521-1 has 1.080.075 digits and entered the T5k PrimePages.

View article · Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:16:30 +0000

[SRBase] base S52 Megaprime

Science United found a megaprime for base S52.
The prime 25492*52^638823+1 has 1.096.227 digits and entered the T5k PrimePages.

View article · Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:09:23 +0000

[Asteroids@home] New models published

It's my pleasure to announce a new paper based on A@H computations with about 30,000 asteroid models reconstructed from survey photometry. This triples the number of asteroids with a shape model. The paper is available at the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal page: https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/202662316 or at Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06082. The models are available at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22812438 and will also be placed in DAMIT: https://damit.cuni.cz. We thank all the volunteers for their contribution! Meanwhile, the amount of available data has increased, so you are now computing updated datasets, including the first photometry from the Vera Rubin Observatory. We are also currently using the project to process synthetic data to be ready to debias results based on the Gaia Data Release 4, which will be available in December 2026.

View article · Thu, 8 Oct 2026 12:18:33 +0000

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