PrimeGrid
BOINC project PrimeGrid is a volunteer computing project that needs your help to advance mathematics.
Why PrimeGrid?
On 12 June 2005, at approximately 14:00 UTC, Message@Home (now PrimeGrid) opened account creation to 50 users. It was being run on Rytis’ home laptop and was developed as a test project for PerlBOINC, an effort to implement the BOINC server system in the Perl programming language in order to bring BOINC server software to Windows.
The first project was Message7, and it attempted by “brute-force” to recover a message encoded with the md5 algorithm. In August, the RSA 640 Factoring Challenge application replaced the Message7 application and in November the project was renamed PrimeGrid after a short public contest.[1]
Goal
PrimeGrid's primary goal is to advance mathematics by enabling everyday computer users to contribute their system's processing power towards prime finding. By simply downloading and installing BOINC and attaching to the PrimeGrid project, participants can choose from a variety of prime forms to search. With a little patience, you may find a large or even record breaking prime and enter into Chris Caldwell's The Largest Known Primes Database with a multi-million digit prime!
PrimeGrid's secondary goal is to provide relevant educational materials about primes. Additionally, we wish to contribute to the field of mathematics.
Lastly, primes play a central role in the cryptographic systems which are used for computer security. Through the study of prime numbers it can be shown how much processing is required to crack an encryption code and thus to determine whether current security schemes are sufficiently secure.
Methods
PrimeGrid is currently running several sub-projects:
- 321 Prime Search: searching for megaprimes of the form 3·2n±1.
- Cullen-Woodall Search: searching for megaprimes of forms n·2n+1 and n·2n−1.
- Generalized Cullen-Woodall Search: searching for megaprimes of forms n·bn+1 and n·bn−1 where n + 2 > b.
- Extended Sierpinski Problem: helping solve the Extended Sierpinski Problem.
- Generalized Fermat Prime Search: searching for megaprimes of the form +1.
- Prime Sierpinski Project: helping the Prime Sierpinski Project solve the Prime Sierpinski Problem.
- Proth Prime Search: searching for primes of the form k·2n+1.
- Seventeen or Bust: helping to solve the Sierpinski Problem.
- Sierpinski/Riesel Base 5: helping to solve the Sierpinski/Riesel Base 5 Problem.
- The Riesel problem: helping to solve the Riesel Problem.
- AP27 Search: searching for record length arithmetic progressions of primes.
You can choose the projects you would like to run by going to the project preferences page.
Project team / Sponsors
Rytis Slatkevičius and the PrimeGrid community.
Scientific results
Twin Prime Search, n=195000
Contains raw data from Twin Prime Search, n=195000 project. Compressed size - 20.9MiB. Download .torrent file
Twin Prime Search, n=333333
Contains raw data from Twin Prime Search, n=333333 project. Compressed size - 607MiB. Download .torrent file
Scientific publications
- Bethune, Iain. PrimeGrid: a Volunteer Computing Platform for Number Theory. Annual International Conference on Computational Mathematics, Computational Geometry & Statistics (2015). DOI: 10.5176/2251-1911_CMCGS15.43.
- Bethune, Iain Arthur and Yves Gallot. Genefer: Programs for Finding Large Probable Generalized Fermat Primes. Journal of Open Research Software (2015). DOI: 10.5334/jors.ca.
- Bethune, Iain and Michael Goetz. Extending the Generalized Fermat Prime Number Search Beyond One Million Digits Using GPUs. Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (2014).