The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (or GIMPS for short) is a distributed computing effort to find Mersenne primes. The project was started by computer programmer George Woltman. Volunteers sign up to allow GIMPS to use their own personal computers to test potential Mersenne primes and send the results back to a central database.
As of 2006, the ten largest known Mersenne primes have been found by GIMPS. The project has also motivated Woltman to write some of the fastest integermultiplication subroutines available today.
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