The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, is a collaborative project of volunteers, who use Prime 95 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 found a total of 8 Mersenne primes, each of which was the largest known prime at the time of discovery. The largest known prime as of March 2005 is 2^25,964,951 − 1. This prime was discovered on February 18, 2005. Refer to the article on Mersenne prime numbers for the complete list of GIMPS successes.

As of February 2005, GIMPS has a sustained throughput of approximately 16 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.

See also

• George Woltman
• Scott Kurowski
• Entropia
• Mathematics
• Distributed computing
• Prime95
• MPrime

External links

• www.mersenne.org – GIMPS Home Page
• www.mersenneforum.org – GIMPS Forum