The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, is a collaborative project of volunteers, who use Prime 95 and MPrime, special open sourcesoftware that can be downloaded from the Internet for free, in order to search for Mersenne prime numbers. The project was founded and the prime testing software was written by George Woltman. Scott Kurowski wrote the PrimeNet server that supports the research to demonstrate Entropia distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997.
This project has been rather successful: it has found a total of 7 Mersenne primes, each of which was the largest known prime at the time of discovery. The largest known prime as of December 2004, is 224,036,583 − 1. This prime was discovered on May 15, 2004 by Josh Findley. Refer to the article on Mersenne prime numbers for the complete list of GIMPS successes.
As of December 2004, GIMPS has a sustained throughput of approximately 16 TFLOPS, earning the GIMPS virtual computer a firm place among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Technically the GIMPS software 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.
If you are a developer interested in creating plug-ins or working on the GIMP source code, you may want to download some additional packages (these are not needed for normal users):
GIMP should run on any NT-based version of Windows (NT4, 2000, XP or Vista).
Older GIMP versions (2.0.x) could also work with older versions of Windows such as Windows 95 but they are not supported anymore.
To stay current with the ever-changing world of software, please consider our Six Month Subscription Plan - we will mail you all versions of our Gimp CD developed during the subscription time.
For more information about Gimp, visit Gimp's home page at www.Gimp.org, The Gimp's source code is located on Gimp's FTP site at: ftp.Gimp.org, GNOME and GTK is at www.gnome.org, XFree at www.XFree.org, and OroborOSX is at oroborosx.sourceforge.net.
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