size of primes

[Keroberts1]

The size of the primes we've been looking for and are going ot be looking for in the future is expected ot grow quickly iunderstand. How long could it take before we're processing numbers around the size of a 100 million digit prime. I understand this is going ot be very far in the future? 10 years? maybe more, maybe much less if a few key primes are found. How long will it be until GIMPS is able ot reac hthis significant number? just wondering if we could have a chance at getting there first.

[hc_grove]

Originally posted by Keroberts1
The size of the primes we've been looking for and are going ot be looking for in the future is expected ot grow quickly iunderstand. How long could it take before we're processing numbers around the size of a 100 million digit prime. I understand this is going ot be very far in the future? 10 years? maybe more, maybe much less if a few key primes are found. How long will it be until GIMPS is able ot reac hthis significant number? just wondering if we could have a chance at getting there first.

It's possible, it just requires that many more people (computers) work on SoB than GIMPS.

Realistically I don't think so. Some of my reasons for thinking so:
- For comparable n's each of our tests will take longer than one of GIMPS's.
- We have more exponents to test for any given range of n's (at least I think so)
- We have 12 k's (but that will hopefully change soon)
- They are ahead by approximately 4.5 million digits. (The tests we hand out are around n=5M, the tests GIMPS hand out are around n=20M)

.Henrik

[Keroberts1]

ok so i did some crunching and my estimate of test they have remaining before testing 10,000,000 digit tests stands at 346 thousand for us I'm seeing 946 thousand. However before that we will hopefully find several primes. Finding 7 more primes assuming we get the most beneficial ones outta the way (also the most likely to falll because of their weight) would eliminate 77% of these. Granted this is not going to get us to 10 million first but I'd be optimistic about 100 million and even 20 million if we find primes as I hope too. I dont know about the time for each test though for equal sized n's are the tests time scale the same. close?

[Keroberts1]

So this could still happen now that we have a prime logged again and some more members mustering their CPUs.