Are the applications used in this project open source software?

Where is the source? (My search foo has so far failed)

Any optimizations that could be done? (in general or for specific architectures)

Thanks for info where the source lives...

Seems Msieve at least has had some improvements since NFS@Home could have pulled it - at least for Linux: https://sourceforge.net/p/msieve/news/?source=navbar

The biggest change seems to be in 1.5.2 release with big improvements in CPUs. That could be in the 16e version for Windows (30 Jul 2014), but not in the Linux version (6 May 2012).

*App versions -https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/apps.php

There are two codebases involved here: we use the sieving tools from GGNFS and the Msieve code for finishing off each factorization. Neither have had serious updates in a while. The GGNFS sieving tools are very good at their job and contain a ton of assembly language for various CPUs, but they are also very difficult to understand and modify with confidence. Msieve is not an application that the BOINC project distributes, finishing each factorization does not run very well in parallel and is not amenable to using BOINC resources. I am the Msieve maintainer and welcome some help, but I've been at this a long time and making the postprocessing faster is not easy.

So if you don't mind a steep learning curve, optimizing the sieving tools is the way to go. The 16e sieving source is here, though the BOINC modifications are not included (but easy).

I should clarify: The 14e and 15e sieve applications use the lasieve4 source in the link I posted previously. The 16e sieve is a completely separate codebase with a link posted here. This is the code that the BOINC client distributes.

For Msieve, anyone who volunteers to run postprocessing is responsible for their own copy of the Msieve application. In practice version 1.52 has been available for a long time, and v1.53 was released a few months ago. I would expect most postprocessing volunteers run the latest and greatest.

Thanks for explaining!

I've got a new AMD Ryzen CPU and was wondering if there was any optimizations that could be done to make it run faster/more efficiently on that arch. I'm happy to test if useful.