I'm no cryptographer so it's good news you don't have any cryptographic question ; )
I basically used my everyday workstation. There were 79 trillions operations to be made and I'd save the intermediate result every 1 billion result (so approximately every 22 minutes I'd save a result).
The computation cannot be parallelized and the i7 I was using has four cores. So basically instead of turning it every night off I'd simply leave it running 24/7.
I'd simply backup the files with the intermediate results once in a while. I rebooted the computer about 50 times in 4 years and during those 4 years during about 3 and half years it was computing towards the solution.
But I coded (totally unrelated things), compiled things from source, browsed the web, did my email, etc. from the very workstation which computed the solution.
The computation is easy to relaunch from any intermediate step.
I basically used my everyday workstation. There were 79 trillions operations to be made and I'd save the intermediate result every 1 billion result (so approximately every 22 minutes I'd save a result).
The computation cannot be parallelized and the i7 I was using has four cores. So basically instead of turning it every night off I'd simply leave it running 24/7.
I'd simply backup the files with the intermediate results once in a while. I rebooted the computer about 50 times in 4 years and during those 4 years during about 3 and half years it was computing towards the solution.
But I coded (totally unrelated things), compiled things from source, browsed the web, did my email, etc. from the very workstation which computed the solution.
The computation is easy to relaunch from any intermediate step.
Thanks for the congrats!