I started participating in the Free-DC Prime Search early last week, and early last night I received a Notifo popup on my iPhone that the computer currently checking for prime numbers had found one:
This yields a number which is 225606 digits long and which currently (though likely not for long) is in 1543rd place on the list of the 5000 largest primes. The prime has its own page on that site and bears the registration number 97197.
Notifo Notification
Prime Registration
2 comments
Alan Porter says:
January 1, 2011 at 7:45 pm (UTC -5 )
I took a quick look at the Free-DC web site… they don’t really make any attempt to explain “what is this site all about?”, and even more important, “how can I contribute?”. They just jump right in with port numbers and stuff. My first guess was that it was some Washington DC group, but later decided it was a distributed computing hive.
I ended up downloading and tinkering with BOINC from Berkeley instead, because their site had a pretty good “how to” and they also offered their client as a Debian package.
Congrats on your prime… that would make a cool bumper sticker (too bad it’s too long for a license plate).
Alan
Scott says:
January 1, 2011 at 9:26 pm (UTC -5 )
I agree that the site could use a bit of work. I followed this guide when setting up the client and it seems to be working as expected. They are actually testing for primes from three different batches of numbers and one can switch between them by changing the port number to which the client makes connections to the server. This prime came from those on port 7773, but 7771 and 7772 are also available.
BOINC is a great tool. I have had, on-and-off, other machines cranking on various projects via BOINC since the Seti@Home folks (and others) released it. There are now a multitude of great projects in a variety of specialties on that platform including, I believe, several other Prime number projects. My stats there.
And of course, the grand-daddy of all prime projects, GIMPS, continues to crunch data. I have machines working on those as well, but since they are only looking for Mersenne primes, and very large ones at that (last one found, 2^43112609-1, was almost 13 million digits long) each work unit takes in the neighborhood of 30 days to check. With the above Free-DC project each is checked in the neighborhood of 10 minutes on a moderate machine.
Good luck in your search!