Re: Xilinx 3s8000?

In article <QJW6g.613$8C.42@xxxxxxxx>, Ron <News5@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tobias Weingartner wrote:
Is this close to what you're looking at doing?

http://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/SHARCS/talks06/bulens.pdf

Thanks for the article Tobias. Parts of it look interesting, but no,
what they are doing bears little resemblance to what I have done. As I
said earlier, my ECM algorithm is coded entirely in Verilog HDL with no
connection to an external PC or anything else (nor any embedded
microprocessor core). Once it's programmed I turn it on (the number to
be factored is hard coded into the FPGA) and wait for it to factor the
requisite composite number and invoke a module I'll have to write myself
because Xilinx only provides VHDL examples of it's interface) that
displays the factor.

I think you are entirely misguided in contemplating using ECM to
factor 'hard' numbers such as the RSA Challenge ones; the expected
number of operations would be so large that the calculation would take
literally millions of years. There is a community (Dan Bernstein
probably the mainstay of it) interested in factorisation using
hardware, and the SHARCS conferences contain the people you'd want to
talk to, but a straight ECM implementation hard-wired to factor a
single number is not all that useful. If only because the pricing of
larger FPGAs is not really competitive with the billion 64x64->128
multiplies a second that a $400 dual-core Opteron processor offers.

Tom
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Xilinx 3s8000?
    ... Yes, as I mentioned to Tom elsewhere in this thread, I have written a 100% Verilog implementation of ECM. ... I have no objection to using an FPGA as an accelerator for a program running on a conventional computer, but was hoping to fit the entire thing on one or more FPGA development boards because that keeps things fast and simple. ... That hope may not be justified of course, because some of the same type of technology is used in both CPUs and FPGAs; however, there is no chance that I'll ever be able to afford a cluster of Opterons, but if I can find a way around the exorbitant prices FPGA vendors charge for proprietary software design tools, I could probably afford a fairly high performance FPGA. ...
    (comp.arch.fpga)
  • Re: Xilinx 3s8000?
    ... ECM doesn't even guarantee any result at all! ... ;-) There is no input to the FPGA because the number to be factored is hard coded into the FPGA, and the factor will be displayed on the board's LCD display, so the only thing connected to the board during operation is power. ... Because of the probabilistic nature of ECM, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever been able to calculate how long ECM would require on average for a particular factorization. ...
    (comp.arch.fpga)