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 as a Titan!

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.

Change in Prime Reporting Procedure
With the release of LLR2, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of primes found by users that don't give permission to report them. To decrease the number of primes stuck waiting for permission to report that we never receive, we will still wait nineteen days for the first prime found by a user, but only seven days for subsequent primes before moving to the double checker or reporting as anonymous.

If you have primes reported to T5K through PrimeGrid already or have given permission to report and provided your name, this doesn't affect you. Otherwise, I strongly encourage you to change your PrimeGrid preferences to give permission. 27 Dec 2020 | 1:12:01 UTC · Comment

Great Conjunction Challenge starts December 21
The ninth and final challenge of the 2020 Series will be a 10-day challenge marking the extraordinarily rare astronomical event known as the Great Conjunction. The challenge will be offered on the GFN-18, GFN-19, and GFN-20 subprojects, beginning 21 December 13:22 UTC and ending 31 December 13:22 UTC.

To participate in the Challenge, please select only the GFN-18 and/or GFN-19 and/or GFN-20 subprojects in your PrimeGrid preferences section.

Addendums? Annotations? Apprehensions? Discuss in the forum thread for this challenge. Best of luck! 18 Dec 2020 | 17:49:56 UTC · Comment

New 121 Mega Prime!
On 18 Nov 2020, 05:40:34 UTC, PrimeGrid’s 27121 Prime Search, through PRPNet found the mega prime:

121*2^9584444+1

The prime is 2,885,208 digits long and will enter Chris Caldwell's The Largest Known Primes Database ranked 60th overall.

The discovery was made by James Winskill (Aeneas) of New Zealand using an Intel Xeon(R) E5-2637 v3 CPU @ 3.50GHz with 64GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. This computer took just under 13 hours 49 minutes to complete the primality test using LLR. James Winskill is a member of the PrimeSearchTeam.

The prime was verified on 18 Nov 2020, 16:42:00 UTC, by an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz with 16 GB RAM, running Linux Gentoo. This computer took a little over 1 hour 42 minutes to complete the primality test using LLR.

For more details, please see the official announcement.

8 Dec 2020 | 14:03:05 UTC · Comment

Changes to GFN Apps
I just installed the new Windows and Linux (but not Mac) CPU versions for the following GFN projects:

GFN-16 Yes, you can run GFN16 on CPUs again!
GFN-17-LOW
GFN-17-MEGA Yes, you can run GFN-17-MEGA on CPUs again!
GFN-18
GFN-19
GFN-20

Genefer 3.3.5 provides substantial speed boosts for CPU on those projects.

This applies only to the CPU apps. GPU apps are not affected.

GFN-21 has not been updated because it's still capable of running the FP64 transforms, which are the fastest.

I have removed the CPU GFN-22 app. It was a mistake.

Mac versions of the new app will be made available when testing is completed, but this has been delayed by a lack of Mac testers.

If you want to help out testing the Mac version, head over to the 3.3.5 testing thread.

Discussion about the new release can be found in the Genefer 3.3.5 release thread.

(19-December) EDIT: The Mac version of 3.3.5 is now live. 4 Dec 2020 | 15:53:57 UTC · Comment

New Subproject!
For the first time in a while, we have a new subproject: the Wieferich and Wall-Sun-Sun Prime Search!

To participate, edit your project preferences. The app is available for GPU and CPU.

Note: there may be severe screen lag on the GPU Mac version. We are aware and a fix will be out soon.

See this forum thread for more information about the search. 28 Nov 2020 | 23:20:08 UTC · Comment

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