TheGreat Internet Mersenne Prime Search, also known asGIMPS, is a prime example ofdistributed computing project at work and no pun intended. It is acollaborative project of volunteers, who usePrime95, software that can be downloaded from the Internet, in order to search forMersenne prime numbers.

Mersenne primes are named afterMarin Mersenne, a French monk and mathematician, who was born in 1588. Mersenne investigated a particular type of prime numbers: 2^p - 1, in whichp is an ordinaryprime.

Mersenne primes are much rarer than ordinary primes, of which there are an infinite number. The GIMPS effort, exhaustively searching for possible candidates since 1996, has been responsible for discovering the largest Mersenne Primes to date. See thelist of known Mersenne primes for more details.

This project has been rather successful: it has found 17Mersenne primes, each of which was the largest known prime at the time of discovery. The largest currently known prime is 2^136,279,841-1 (M52). Refer to the article on Mersenne primes for the complete list of GIMPS successes.

The project was founded byGeorge Woltman, who also wrote theprime testing softwarePrime95. The GIMPS project was formed in January 1996.Scott Kurowski wrote thePrimeNet server software that supports the research to demonstrate Entropia distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997. In 2008, a legal entity was registered to administer GIMPS –Mersenne Research, Inc.

TheElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offered $100,000 to the first person(s) who discovered aten million digits prime. GIMPS claimed this award. The owner of the discovering computer received $50,000 from the GIMPS foundation.

Although the GIMPS software has its source code available, technically it is notopen source, since it has a restriction which most open source/free software groups find unacceptable – users must abide by the prize distribution terms. This restriction will become meaningless when the EFFprizes are claimed.

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

Most GIMPS membersjoin the search for the thrill of possibly discovering a record-setting, rare, and historic, new Mersenne prime. All you have to do to be part of it, is to contribute spare or idle CPU cycles. Pretty cool.

If you want to know more, there is aGIMPS FAQ available in this wiki.

External links

• GIMPS Home Page
• GIMPS Forum
• PrimeNet server

• Shortcut
• Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search