I think the answer to this is: unlikely. Not that there aren't machines that are large enough to do it. Recent machines from Cray, IBM specialty machines for the Department of Defense/National Labs all have enough horsepower to do the job, BUT I doubt that anyone is interested in giving up that much computing power on those machines. One of the key attributes of GIMPS is that it is, ostensibly, consuming idle cycles.
Even if you bought cheap hardware, 17,036 systems @ $1,000/system is $17million. GIMPS is not a particularly cheap solution. -----Original Message----- Subject: Mersenne: Will a mainframe ever hold the record again? Do you think that a mainframe computer will ever again hold the record for the largest known prime, or will they be unable to compete with thousands of personal computers in a distributed project? Just wondering. +---------------------------------------------------------+ | Jud McCranie | _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
