Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

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Fig. 2: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search website at www.mersenne.org

GIMPS is a unique distributed computing project for many reasons. George Woltman displays the GIMPS software source code, and welcomes anyone to revise the software or make enhancements, as long as they follow the GIMPS regulations. And, although the source code has been fully released, there doesn't seem to be the threat of data contamination that is present in other distributed computing projects. If the results indicate a prime number, other users could check the same exponent and verify that it is a Mersenne prime, and it seems unlikely that someone who found a Mersenne prime would keep the discovery hidden. The most unusual aspect of GIMPS, though, is that results can still be sent in manually, instead of automatically, the method of choice for most other projects. The users were required to send the results in manually when the project was first created, and, although the software features now allow the results to be sent automatically, Woltman has opted to leave the manual option to let the user choose how the data is sent back.

However, the GIMPS project is similar in many ways to other distributed computing projects as well. GIMPS is an infinite search, similar to the PiHex project, so it could continue forever. And, like RC5-64, the user receives more data to process before the first batch of data has been completely processed. Also similar to many other distributed computing projects, GIMPS proves that there can be as much success in searching for Mersenne prime numbers using a distributed computing system as using a Cray supercomputer, or other such supercomputers.

In addition to searching for Mersenne primes, the GIMPS project is currently searching for a prime with ten million of digits in order to win the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award. As it will take a 500 MHz PC a whole year to test a single exponent, the chances of being the discoverer of the world's new largest prime are very slim — 1 in 250,000, in fact. It is very likely that the search for Mersenne prime numbers, as well as regular prime numbers, will continue, as the number of total Mersenne prime numbers is thought to be infinite. (Caldwell: "There are infinitely..")

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