NFS@Home (original) (raw)

About NFS@Home

NFS@Home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do the lattice sieving step in the Number Field Sieve factorization of large integers. As a young school student, you gained your first experience at breaking an integer into prime factors, such as 15 = 3 * 5 or 35 = 5 * 7. NFS@Home is a continuation of that experience, only with integers that are hundreds of digits long. Most recent large factorizations have been done primarily by large clusters at universities. With NFS@Home you can participate in state-of-the-art factorizations simply by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

Integer factorization is interesting from both mathematical and practical perspectives. Mathematically, for instance, the calculation of multiplicative functions in number theory for a particular number require the factors of the number. Likewise, the integer factorization of particular numbers can aid in the proof that an associated number is prime. Practically, many public key algorithms, including the RSA algorithm, rely on the fact that the publicly available modulus cannot be factored. If it is factored, the private key can be easily calculated. Until quite recently, RSA-512, which uses a 512-bit modulus (155 digits), was commonly used but can now be easily broken.

Many of the numbers that we are factoring are chosen from the Cunningham project. Started in 1925, it is one of the oldest continuously ongoing projects in computational number theory. The third edition of the book, published by the American Mathematical Society in 2002, is available as a free download. All results obtained since, including those of NFS@Home, are available on the Cunningham project website.

NFS@Home is hosted at California State University Fullerton, and is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through ACCESS resources provided by the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Purdue University under grant number DMS100027.

Join NFS@Home

• Read our rules and policies
• This project uses BOINC. If you're already running BOINC, select Attach to Project. If not, sign up or download BOINC.
• When prompted, select NFS@Home from the list of projects.
• If you're running a command-line or pre-5.0 version of BOINC,create an account first.
• If you have any problems,get help here.
• Detailed status of lasieved
• Detailed status of lasievee_small
• Detailed status of lasievee
• Detailed status of lasievef_small
• Server status

Returning participants

• Your account - view stats, modify preferences
• Teams - create or join a team
• Certificate
• Applications

Community

• Profiles
• User search
• Message boards
• Status of Numbers
• Statistics
• Languages
• Special contributions

User of the day

Mary
I'm currently majoring in both Astrophysics and Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. I'm still debating whether or not I want to add Mathematics...

News

BOINC Pentathlon - Thanks again!
Thanks to all the BOINC Pentathlon participants who once again devoted their time and computing power to NFS@Home. The project server was struggling to keep up with you at times, but overall it was a success. And thanks again to SETI.Germany for putting this together again. Until next time!
18 May 2025, 19:13:40 UTC · Discuss

BOINC Pentathlon
Welcome back BOINC Pentathlon participants. NFS@Home has again been chosen this year for the Javelin Throw discipline starting May 9 at midnight UTC. Good luck to all!
6 May 2025, 18:21:05 UTC · Discuss

BOINC Pentathlon - Thank you!
Thank you to all the BOINC Pentathlon participants who devoted their time and computing power to NFS@Home, and to SETI.Germany for organizing this event. We look forward to next time!
21 May 2024, 1:00:21 UTC · Discuss

BOINC Pentathlon
Welcome BOINC Pentathlon participants. NFS@Home has been chosen for the Javelin Throw discipline starting May 10 at midnight UTC.
9 May 2024, 16:31:16 UTC · Discuss

And we're back!
The NFS@Home server was unexpectedly caught up in a campus network reorganization. That knocked us offline for a bit over a day. There may be brief outages over the next few days as we get everything settled again, but we are mostly back up with a new IP address. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Edit: The site came back up in the US on Friday afternoon PST, but because of a misconfigured firewall it wasn't available worldwide until Saturday afternoon. Again, we apologize for the issues.
5 Jan 2024, 21:43:57 UTC · Discuss

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