As of today, no new reservations will be permitted for manual sieving. I'm shutting it down.

As you may have read elsewhere, after 8 years behind the scenes here, Michael Goetz and I have decided that it's time to pass PrimeGrid on to someone else. The sieving we're doing is meant to get us to an optimal level for work done over the next five years. The sieving is non-essential and closing it down now allows me to leave completed sieve files with no holes and a much easier path for someone creating new work. Pllus there's a rather large infrastructure I have on my home systems to create the sieving stats and graphs. None of that has ever run on the PrimeGrid servers.

The immediate learning curve for anyone taking over PrimeGrid will be less steep without manual sieving. I'd rather stop it now than have less-than-perfect sieving be accepted. It took me three weeks to clean up all the previous bad sieving when I first started in this job. Nobody had even noticed, though John had doubts over the sieving quality.

All factor files and sieve files will be stored (as they've always been) on the PrimeGrid server. They're also automatically backed up onto the other PrimeGrid server, the database replica box. Nothing will be lost.

Anyone with an interest in running PG or even parts of it (like manual sieving?) should contact either Michael Goetz or me. It's almost certainly too much for a single person to do him/her self.