Certifying Giant Nonprimes

ePrint Report: Certifying Giant Nonprimes

Charlotte Hoffmann, Pavel Hubáček, Chethan Kamath, Krzysztof Pietrzak

GIMPS and PrimeGrid are large-scale distributed projects dedicated to searching giant prime numbers, usually of special forms like Mersenne and Proth. The numbers in the current search-space are millions of digits large and the participating volunteers need to run resource-consuming primality tests. Once a candidate prime $N$ has been found, the only way for another party to independently verify the primality of $N$ used to be by …

consuming current distributed eprint report forms large numbers party prime projects report run scale search space special tests verify volunteers