Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

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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 December 2005, GIMPS has a sustained throughput of approximately 18 TFLOPS, earning the GIMPS virtual computer a firm place among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Although the GIMPS software has its source code available, technically it is not open 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 EFF prizes are claimed.

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

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Primes found

All primes are in the form Mn, where n is the exponent. The prime number itself is <math>2^n - 1</math>.

Discovery date	Prime	Digits
15 December, 2005	M30 402 457	9152052
18 February, 2005	M25 964 951	7816230
15 May, 2004	M24 036 583	7235733
17 November, 2003	M20 996 011	6320430
14 November, 2001	M13 466 917	4053946
01 June, 1999	M6 972 593	2098960
27 January, 1998	M3 021 377	909526
24 August, 1997	M2 976 221	895932
13 November, 1996	M1 398 269	420921