Since you were backing up the partial results, I assume this means you could load such a backup and continue from it if something happened to the running machine.
Does that mean that you could, if you wished, have switched to a different machine and just continued where you left off? E.g., could the Peffers team, if they knew about it, theoretically have taken your partial results and run them on their FPGA to obtain the final result a little bit faster than if would have been otherwise?
(Not suggesting this is in any way what you should have done. Just curious)
> Does that mean that you could, if you wished, have switched to a different machine and just continued where you left off?
Totally. It's even explained in the original problem description: the idea was that every year you'd switch to more efficient hardware, picking up the computation where you let it off, until Moore's law stopped applying.
I considered upgrading from my i7 6700 to a 8700-K overclocked for slightly faster clock speed (and maybe some instructions taking fewer cycles). It'd have saved some time.
Does that mean that you could, if you wished, have switched to a different machine and just continued where you left off? E.g., could the Peffers team, if they knew about it, theoretically have taken your partial results and run them on their FPGA to obtain the final result a little bit faster than if would have been otherwise?
(Not suggesting this is in any way what you should have done. Just curious)