Distributed Computing - PrimeNet
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Currently, the top distributed computing network is PrimeNet (http://mersenne.org.primenet/). PrimeNet is a world-wide, distributed Internet research computing system created in 1997 for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). People who take part in this project run a simple program on their computers, a program which constantly tests Mersenne numbers to see if they are prime numbers. While the fastest supercomputer hosts 5120 processors, the PrimeNet system connects over 65,000 processors at any given time. In technical terms, the virtual machine’s sustained throughput is nearly 9 trillion operations per second or 9 teraflops. This is an exponential rise from 1.4 teraflops in March 2001 when there were not as many computers actively participating, nor were the computers as powerful as they are today. Now understandably, the Earth-Simulator is still a much more powerful computer, boasting 36 teraflops of sustained performance since it is a localized system built for the sole purpose of performing calculations. But the PrimeNet system remains one of the most powerful computers in the world.
The latest achievement of the GIMPS project was on November 17, 2003 when 26 year old Michigan State University student Michael Shafer’s computer found the 40th known Mersenne prime, 220,996,011-1. This is also the largest prime number ever known. The discovery was quite amazing, not only for math geeks and distributed computing fanatics, but for the general public as well. NewScientist.com was the first to break the news, quickly followed by major publications like ZDNet and BBC. The number, 6,320,430 digits long, big enough to fill 1,087 pages of 8˝ inch by 11 inch paper without margins, is evidence of just how powerful these programs like Prime95 (the program used by PrimeNet) can be by getting computers on a global scale to work together for a common goal.
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