[mikrofon]

New Mersenne prime found

Much as I enjoy math puzzles, I prefer a Prime Filet Mignon, thank you...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Background:

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

**************************************************

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, also known as GIMPS, is a prime example of Distributed Computing project at work and no pun intended. It is a collaborative project of volunteers, who use Prime95 and MPrime, software that can be downloaded from the Internet, in order to search for Mersenne prime numbers.

Mersenne primes are named after Marin Mersenne, a French monk and mathematician, who was born in 1588. Mersenne investigated a particular type of prime number: , in which P is an ordinary prime number.

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 seven most recent Mersenne Primes. Altogether, in all of history only 43 Mersenne Primes have been discovered.

This project has been rather successful: it has already found a total of 9 Mersenne primes, each of which was the largest known prime at the time of discovery. The largest currently known prime is 2^30,402,457 - 1. This prime was discovered on December 15, 2005. Refer to the article on Mersenne primes for the complete list of GIMPS successes.

The project was founded by George Woltman, who also wrote the prime testing software. The GIMPS project was formed in January 1996. Scott Kurowski wrote the PrimeNet server software that supports the research to demonstrate Entropia distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997.

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.

Most GIMPS members join 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 a GIMPS FAQ available in this wiki.

[edit]

See also

• Marin Mersenne
• George Woltman
• Scott Kurowski
• Distributed Computing

[edit]

External links

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

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From:

Mersenne prime confirmed

******************************************************

December 26, 2005 @ 8:07AM - posted by Rian J. Stockbower

Mersenne prime confirmed

Last Tuesday I reported on the potential finding of the 43rd Mersenne prime. Yesterday, Christmas Day, the prime was confirmed and it is 9,152,052 digits long, which means that the $100,000 EFF prize for the first 10 million digit prime is still up for grabs. I'd speculate that the next Mersenne prime will probably be over 10 million digits, so if you're a prize money DCer, now would probably be the time to get involved. ;)

The new prime was independently verified in 5 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.

The prime was found by the Central Missouri State University team, the most productive Mersenne team in terms of Pentium-90 CPU-years, and the second most powerful team in terms of exponents tested, where the Ars team has them beat. (Don't ask me why P-90 years instead of exponents factored puts them at #1, because it seems backwards to me as well.)

You will be able to order a poster of the prime number relatively soon.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

(2 raised to 30,402,457)-1.

[socal_parrot]

New Mersenne prime found

This just in...

Alan Greenspan today raised the Mersenne prime a quarter point.

[Lurker]

OK, I have to ask. If a prime number is only divisible by one and itself what the heck is a Mersenne prime and how does it differ from a regular prime number?

That's not explained in the article.

L

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

A break from Politics....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[theFIRMbss]

Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way

So ferry 'cross the Mersey
'cause this land's the place I love
and here I'll stay

People they rush everywhere
Each with their own secret care

So ferry 'cross the Mersey
and always take me there
The place I love

People around every corner
They seem to smile and say
We don't care what your name is boy
We'll never turn you away

So I'll continue to say
Here I always will stay

So ferry 'cross the Mersey
'cause this land's the place I love
and here I'll stay
and here I'll stay
Here I'll stay

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the ping.

Prime Numbers (another interesting page)
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Prime_numbers.html

-- Adding up digits of prime numbers for no reason (a numerological approach to non-understanding):

2=2
3=3
5=5
7=7
11=2
13=4
17=8
19=10=1
23=5
29=11=2
31=4
37=10=1
41=5
43=7
47=11=2
53=8
57=12=3

(more to come)