Department of Computer Science
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
Ruzicka/SoS Undergraduate Summer 2001 Research Award
Project: "Two Elliptic Curv Method Factoring Programs"
Student: Abhilasha Bhargav
Advisor: Sam Wagstaff
This project is supported by the School of Science at Purdue during
Summer 2001. Abhilasha started working on this project in Spring of 2001
and she presented it in the Undergraduate Research Day sponsored by the
School of Science at Purdue University on April 7, 2001.
Proposal:
The goal of this project is (a) to fetch and compare two ecm programs on
Sun workstations and (b) to port ecm to the IBM SP. The Elliptic Curve
Method (ECM) is used to factor numbers of the form 2N-1 and 2N+1 . There
are several prizes for factoring Fermat numbers, or gain a small footnote
in math history by finding a new factor for the Cunningham tables, or improve
Paul Leyland's table for Mersenne numbers below 10,000, etc. My aim in
the project is first to download two ecm programs, with the respective
libraries , then run and debug them in a sun work station. This is the
improved version from Paul Zimmermann (Inria), and on comparing it with
what is known, I should get similar results with the run times also close
to the value known. Once this is done, another file will be downloaded
which is made to run faster on the sun machine whereas the former was optimized
for PC's and Alpha's. This new file uses MAGMA (Computer Algebra Package,
which is useful to researchers in Cryptography). After these two (C) programs
are working successfully, I will port them into an IBM SP and see which
one is faster there, running on just one processor. Next, the faster one
is taken and made parallel by running it with more than one processors.
This would accomplish more calculations in lesser time, and the probability
of a number getting factorized would be increased.