A year of Development.

In 2014, we found Dario Aplern’s ECM factorization page. By 2018, we were using multiple instances to make the most of multi-core processors. This enabled us to run some processes in parallel, resulting in competitive factorizations.

Factorizations are measured by the magnitude of the largest co-factor, so the relevant number is the second largest factor, not simply the biggest part of the factorization. This is because a small factor takes little processing to discover, while the largest portion is tested for primeness statistically. The task is only difficult if the large unfactored portion has a large co-factor.