Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

Common card · No. 464198

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers. GIMPS was founded in 1996 by George Woltman, who also wrote the Prime95 client and its Linux port MPrime. Scott Kurowski wrote the back-end PrimeNet server to demonstrate volunteer computing software by Entropia, a company he founded in 1997. GIMPS is registered as Mersenne Research, Inc. with Kurowski as Executive Vice President and board director. GIMPS is said to be one of the first large-scale volunteer computing projects over the Internet for research purposes. As of October 2024, the project has found 18 Mersenne primes, 16 of which were the largest known prime number when they were discovered. The largest known prime is 2136,279,841 − 1 (or M136,279,841 for short) and was discovered on October 12, 2024, by Luke Durant. On June 18, 2025, the project passed a milestone after all exponents below 136,279,841 were checked at...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Viliam Furík, Public domain