I can swear something like 20+ years ago I found a new one too, but I didn’t realize the importance of it. I had just downloaded GIMPS and I was just messing around with it, and when I saw the message I thought “ok, cool!” and proceeded to turn it off.
Nice and tentative congratulations.<p>I use to run Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), but now all I have is laptops. It runs to hot on the Laptops I have :(<p>Will need to play with throttling some more.<p>Edit: found mprime (mprime-bin-24.14) is available in NetBSD pkgsrc. But this uses 32 bit linux emulation to execute, I have been trying to avoid it, but may try it.
Finally! Just when I thought everyone had moved their spare compute to more lucrative schemes.<p>It’s the longest wait for a new mersenne prime since the discovery of M32 in 1992.
Awesome. I have been recommending in my organization, 24 Hrs. Prime95 Stress Test as part of acceptance protocol for all new servers ! Happy to see it find another record Mersenne Prime.
Given this contest can presumably go on infinitely long, what is the ultimate point of the contest? Is there some kind of theoretical or practical benefit to discovering a new Mersenne prime?
If anyone is interested in knowing more, Veritasium has a good video on this, "The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math": <a href="https://youtu.be/Zrv1EDIqHkY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Zrv1EDIqHkY</a>
Are there statistics on the scale of compute available to GIMPS for this search? Is there any evidence that by crowdsourcing the clients, we are searching faster than, eg, a dedicated cluster financed by a government or a corporation? What is the impact of GIMPS as a distributed problem solving tool? Like, if there was a practical application, how much money would it take to exceed GIMPS throughput, that curious people provide for free?<p>I’d like it to be astronomical, but given the niche of this, and the low cost of cloud compute, the answer is predicable depressing, like, “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput”
For others that, like me, do not know… a Mersenne prime is when the n is prime and the resulting M is also prime in the following equation.<p>M = 2ⁿ - 1
Anyone have a sense of how much money/electrical power is being spent to discover these primes? I'm not about to argue for bitcoin calculations over this, I'm just curious how it compares.
I always wondered if we could parallelize a prime test on GPU. That would give us a Datacenter level compute and really help us scale, but it might be too hard to do.