The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, is a collaborative project of volunteers, who use Prime95 and MPrime, special software that can be downloaded from the Internet for free, in order to search for Mersenne prime numbers. The project was founded and the prime testing software was written by George Woltman. Scott Kurowski wrote the PrimeNet Server that supports the research to demonstrate Entropia distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997.

This project has been rather successful: it has already found a total of nine Mersenne primes, each of which was the largest known prime at the time of discovery. The largest known prime as of December 2005 is 2^30,402,457 − 1 (or M30402457 in short). This prime was discovered on December 15, 2005 on a 700 PC cluster operated by Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper at the Central Missouri State University. Refer to the article on Mersenne prime numbers for the complete list of GIMPS successes.

As of June 2006, GIMPS has a sustained throughput of over 20 TFLOPS, earning the GIMPS virtual computer a firm place among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Although the GIMPS software is open source, technically it is not free software, since it has a restriction that users must abide by the prize distribution terms. This restriction will become meaningless when the EFF prizes are claimed.

For open source alternatives, Glucas and Mlucas are both licensed under the GPL.

Primes found

All primes are in the form Mn, where n is the exponent. The prime number itself is $2^n\; -\; 1$, so the first prime number in this table is $2^\{30402457\}\; -\; 1$.

See also

• George Woltman
• Scott Kurowski
• Entropia
• Mathematics
• List of distributed computing projects
• Distributed computing
• Prime95
• MPrime

External links

• www.mersenne.org – GIMPS Home Page
• www.mersenneforum.org – GIMPS Forum
• PrimeNet server
• Mersenne Wiki

Distributed computing | Prime numbers

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