NFS@Home

NFS@Home
NFS@Home logo
Project
Status	Active
Category	Mathematics
Compute	CPU
Development
Developer	Greg Childers
Author	Greg Childers
Sponsor	California State University, Fullerton
Maintainer	NFS@Home team
Initial release	January 1, 2010  (16 years ago)
Repository	https://github.com/childers
Software
Written in	C, C++
Operating system	Windows, Linux, macOS
BOINC statistics
Stats as of	January 23, 2026  (0 years ago)
Performance	67.27 TFLOPS
Active users	1,505
Total users	21,193
Active hosts	5,314
Total hosts	352,727
Analytics
Credit/day	12,342,466
CPU performance	67.27 TFLOPS
Metadata
Website	https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/
License	GNU General Public License

NFS@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project based on the BOINC platform. The project performs the lattice sieving stage of the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS), currently the fastest known classical algorithm for factoring large integers.

The project is operated by Dr. Greg Childers at California State University, Fullerton. NFS@Home allows volunteers around the world to contribute unused CPU time toward large‑scale integer factorization efforts related to mathematical research and cryptography.

History

NFS@Home originated from interest within the distributed computing community in applying volunteer computing resources to integer factorization problems. Prior work included development of the GGNFS and msieve software packages, which implemented variants of the Number Field Sieve algorithm.

Before NFS@Home launched, a BOINC‑based project called RSA Lattice Siever distributed sieving work related to the factorization of cryptographic signing keys used in Texas Instruments graphing calculators.

Greg Childers contributed to the RSA Lattice Siever project and later used experience gained from that effort to launch NFS@Home in 2010.

After RSA Lattice Siever ceased operations, some of its workloads and methodologies were merged into NFS@Home, expanding the project to support a broader range of factorization tasks.

Research goals

NFS@Home focuses on the lattice sieving stage of the Number Field Sieve algorithm. This stage is computationally intensive and highly parallelizable, making it suitable for volunteer distributed computing.

The project has contributed to:

• Cunningham Project factorizations
• Large composite integer factorizations
• Aliquot sequence research
• Mathematical and cryptographic investigations involving large semiprimes

Results generated by NFS@Home are often published to the Cunningham tables and related mathematical databases.

Project applications

NFS@Home distributes several applications to volunteers, each targeting different sieve sizes and workloads.

Application	Purpose
lasieved	14e lattice sieving
lasievee	15e lattice sieving
lasieve5f	16e lattice sieving version 5
lasievee_small	Smaller-number 15e sieving
lasievef_small	Smaller-number 16e sieving

Current project statistics

As of January 2026, the project reported:

• Over 21 000 registered users
• More than 352 000 participating computers
• Approximately 67 TFLOPS of computing performance
• More than 12 million BOINC credits granted daily

Project team and sponsorship

NFS@Home is developed and maintained by Dr. Greg Childers at California State University, Fullerton.

The project has received infrastructure and computational support through programs funded by the National Science Foundation and ACCESS cooperative infrastructure initiatives.

California State University, Fullerton. Humanities and Social Sciences May 2010 Commencement. This is a view of the front entrance of the Humanities and Social Sciences building.

Software

NFS@Home applications are based primarily on the following software packages:

• Msieve
• GGNFS
• BOINC middleware

The project primarily distributes CPU‑based workloads and does not currently provide native GPU applications.

Scientific results

All project results are published through the NFS@Home website and associated mathematical databases.

Result databases

• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/crunching.php Detailed status of lasieved
• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/crunching_es.php Detailed status of lasievee_small
• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/crunching_e.php Detailed status of lasievee
• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/crunching_fs.php Detailed status of lasievef_small
• https://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~ssw/cun/ Cunningham Project – factorisation records, (ongoing database; many NFS@Home results appear in the “latest records” table).

Scientific publications

The data and computational power generated by the NFS@Home volunteer network have been directly utilized, cited, and analyzed across several prominent peer-reviewed papers and cryptography reports:

• Factorization of a 1061-bit number by the Special Number Field Sieve (2012)

  Author: Greg Childers

  Publication: Cryptology ePrint Archive (Report 2012/444)

  Details: This landmark paper documents the record-breaking factorization of the 1061-bit Mersenne-like composite number $2^{1061}-1$. The text explicitly credits the volunteer infrastructure, noting that the NFS@Home project distributed the massive, memory-intensive sieving tasks to volunteer computers using the BOINC framework to compile the necessary relations.

• A survey of Fermat factorization algorithms for factoring RSA composite numbers (2023)

  Publication: Algorithmic Security Research / Cryptographic Survey

  Details: This survey analyzes the efficiency limits of physical computing clusters versus globally distributed architectures. It highlights NFS@Home as a primary case study for utilizing client workstations worldwide to solve computationally demanding problems, detailing its real-world success in parsing massive multi-hundred-digit integers into their constituent prime factors.

Formal acknowledgement

• The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2 (2018)

  Author: Donald Knuth (Stanford University)

  Details: While not a traditional journal article, the world-renowned computer scientist formally updated his textbook errata and published research notes acknowledging NFS@Home. In the textbook, Knuth had embedded a hidden encrypted RSA message assuming it would remain unbroken for generations; the paper notes that the project's coordinator and roughly 500 volunteer nodes cracked the code, identifying the underlying primes.

  "Shock, shock! On September 14 I learned from Greg Childers that he, together with about 500 volunteers in the NFS@Home project, had cracked the code --- and he presented me with the exact answer. Congratulations to them!"

• Factorisation of RSA-220 with CADO-NFS" (2016)" (2016)

  Authors: Shi Bai, Pierrick Gaudry, Alexander Kruppa, Emmanuel Thomé, and Paul Zimmermann

  Publication: HAL-Inria / Nancy-Université

  Details: While detailing their own milestone factorization using the CADO-NFS software suite, the researchers explicitly cited and benchmarked their computational footprint against massive milestones completed by the volunteer platform. The paper formally indexes NFS@Home's successful factorization of the 221-digit Cunningham number $3^{697}+1$.

See also

• NumberFields@Home
• Integer factorization
• BOINC
• Cunningham project

External links

• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/ Official website
• https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/server_status.php Server status
• https://www.mersenneforum.org/node/59 NFS@Home forum on Mersenne Forum
• https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ BOINC official website