Primenet is 10 years old

It was 10 years ago today that I installed the new prime95 program that would connect to primenet to retrieve mersenne prime numbers for testing. I had been participating for over 2 years before primenet was created. Before primenet was created you sent an e-mail to George Woltman. George kept track of all of the prime numbers and would send you 3-4 primes that you would run. You would then e-mail the results in your results file from him to process back into his database where he tracked all of the results.

Prime net replaced all of this manual effort and allowed George to focus on maintaining and improving his FFT code. Prime95 is a program that takes advantage of CPU’s architecture, and pushes it to it’s limits. It is also one of the friendliest programs to install on your computer. This program plays nice with all of programs I have ever run in my 10+ years running it. I’ve never seen it interfere with other programs. It has also detected many CPU and RAM failures before they became failures that ended in catastrophe. This is a testament to George’s concise meticulous error trapping programming ways and truly only wanting to use free CPU cycles and nothing else. I’ve run other distributed programs and several of them tend to want to hog the CPU and not let go immediately.

Here are some helpful links to learn about Mersenne primes, and how you can contribute to discovering them.

http://www.mersenne.org/

http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml

http://mersennewiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

Some quick stats for marking the 10 years:

As of today I’ve tested 293 Exponents

Totaling 656 Pentium 90 CPU years to the project + a couple of years prior to primenet.

Over the past 10 years it has taken me an average of 3-6 weeks to complete a test of a single prime depending upon the age of my computer.

A prime in the 39-40 million range takes about 10-11 Pentium 90 years. So in the space of 3-6 weeks today, I can do the work that it would take my P90 10-11 years to do. Amazing