Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

Not to be confused with GIMP.
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)
Logo
Software usedprime95 (CPU), GpuOwl/PRPLL, Mlucas, mfaktc/mfakto, CUDALucas (GPU)
Total users280,000
Total hosts2,900,000
Websitemersenne.org

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 a total of eighteen Mersenne primes, sixteen of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery. The largest known prime as of October 2024 is 2136,279,841 − 1 (or M136,279,841 for short) and was discovered on October 12, 2024, by Luke Durant, and оn June 18, 2025, the project passed a milestone after all exponents below 136,279,841 were checked at least once.

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