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Acknowledgments

As always when finally completing something on which work has been ongoing for a long time, one realizes that when time comes to thank everyone that has helped out, much has already been forgotten. We do however have a number of people and institutions to which we would like to express our thanks for assisting us with both computing resources and knowledge.

We are deeply grateful to Johan Håstad of the Royal Institute of Technology for a continuous flow of good advice and encouragement. Many were the times when we asked him to explain the inner workings of the Number Field Sieve.

We would also like to thank Samuel Lundqvist and Christopher Hermansson-Muth, who were keeping our hopes up in the chase for the solution to Stage 5, and also took active part in the solution of Stages 3 and 7. We also thank Mikael Goldmann, who always kindly offered his advice.

We also want to express our thanks to CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica) that wrote the code we used for the solution of Stage 10.

We thank the head of the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology, for letting us use a large number of workstations for the sieving step of Stage 10. Our thanks also go to the system administrators; they endured a lot of problems arising from the heavy IO-requirements of our programs.

Compaq provided access to one of their benchmarking computers with four 667 MHz Alphas and 8 GB of primary memory. This was where we made 90% of the computations necessary for solving a huge system of equations in the final stages of the decryption of Stage 10. We believe that they thus can claim to have provided the hardware for a record factorization without super-computer use.

UMS Medicis 658, Palaiseau, France, provided generous access to their Compaq DS20 dual processor 500 MHz Alpha with 4 GB of primary memory where we performed most of the filtering and verified the parallelization of the Gauss elimination.

We would like to thank the National Supercomputer Centre, Linköping, Sweden, for access to computing resources that made it possible for us to perform the first steps of filtering of the relations in Stage 10, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, for access to their computers for sieving, and the High Performance Computing Center North, Umeå, Sweden, for sieving and initial execution of a square-root finding program for Stage 10.

We would like to thank Across Wireless and the employees there for using our screen saver for cracking Stage 9. A special thanks goes to Per Höckerman, who slept in late one morning to arrive at 07:00, less than an hour after his computer had reported the correct solution to the server.


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