Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Missouri Researchers Find Largest Prime Number

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> To say a little more - I haven't seen the details of what they did, but 
> I would guess that a large part of this work is to apply already 
> established techniques and throw more computer power at it.  But I could 
> be completely wrong.

There's some info here:

http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm

The Central Missouri team has done a lot of computing for this project, I 
guess.  Here's a web page for the software.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm


> I did a similar (well much easier) computation a few years ago.  I 
> computed the number of ways to place the five tetrominoes and 12 
> pentominoes into an 8 by 10 rectangle, as described on this web page: 
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~gp/PolyominoSolver/Polyomino.html.  The challenge 
> wasn't in how to do it so much as where to get sufficient computer power 
> - I estimated it would take one fast desktop computer about a year.  So 
> I used the computers in the GCB math labs over a vacation, and ran them 
> in parallel, and it took a few days to find that there were 
> 3,386,001,688 of them.
>
> Most definitely just pure curiosity - nothing else.  And I learned a lot 
> about TCP/IP programming in C.

I remember that you developed a program that does something like what 
GIMPS or SETI do -- distributing parts of jobs to many PCs.  I was very 
impressed by your programming skill.

Mike

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