Founded by MIT scientist George Woltman in 1996, GIMPS is an ongoing distributed computing project that has been actively searching for Mersenne primes. As of now, there are 51 Mersenne primes found, and 17 were found by GIMPS, those are the largest and newest ones. Dr. Chris Caldwell maintains a website that has an excellent introduction on Mersenne Primes. See https://t5k.org/mersenne/ .
The GIMPS project provides a free program that uses volunteer computational powers to search for primes. Essentially anyone that has a PC with a decent CPU can start their prime search, it will usually take weeks to months to finish checking a new exponent. There are cash rewards offered to lucky person who finds a new prime, that include 3,000 (USD) GIMPS Research Discovery Award and 150,000 (USD) Electronic Frontier Foundation Award to the first person or group to discover a 100,000,000 digit prime number! You can make history too! See https://www.mersenne.org/ for details.
Total CPU Time Spent: 1656 GHz Days
The following 7 assignments have been completed:
$M(69635581)$ - 20,962,399 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
$M(69636487)$ - 20,962,672 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
$M(69649927)$ - 20,966,718 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
$M(116803187)$ - 35,161,263 digits - Probable Prime Test (First Check)
$M(69525371)$ - 20,929,233 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
$M(69602569)$ - 20,952,462 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
$M(69646999)$ - 20,965,836 digits - Lucas–Lehmer Test (Double Checking)
There are 0 CPUs currently assigned to: