Wednesday, October 10, 2012

[praiyqer] NFS QS boundary time

On a modern top-of-the-line PC or workstation with many cores, what is the wall clock time of a factorization that takes an equal amount of time for the quadratic sieve or the general number field sieve?  That is, what is the crossover point in terms of wall-clock time (not in terms of digits as is typically given)?

Is it less than a day?  If so, then a push-button set-and-forget NFS implementation becomes desirable (similar to unix factor, gmp-ecm, and yafu).  It becomes possible to test and tune such an implementation as well, with a development cycle of a less than day.

If not, NFS still remains in the realm of multiple machine parallel computing, for which every user will have a different setup, so a push-button solution is not even possible.  (Maybe cloud computing, though I don't know how much people would be willing to pay.)

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