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<p>The <b>Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search</b> is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available <a href="/pages/w/108537175843809">software</a> to search for <a href="/pages/w/105942382769832">Mersenne prime numbers</a>.</p><p>The GIMPS project was founded by <a href="/pages/w/111112062272864">George Woltman</a>, who also wrote the software <a href="/pages/w/107700462593055">Prime95</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPrime" class="wikipedia">MPrime</a> for the project. <a href="/pages/w/103378689715781">Scott Kurowski</a> wrote the <a href="http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/" class="external">PrimeNet</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_server" class="wikipedia">Internet server</a> that supports the research to demonstrate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia%2C_Inc._" class="wikipedia">Entropia</a>-distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997. GIMPS is registered as <b>Mersenne Research, Inc.</b> Kurowski is Executive Vice President and board director of <a href="http://v5www.mersenne.org/legal/" class="external">Mersenne Research Inc.</a> GIMPS is said to be one of the first large scale <a href="/pages/w/111964248816900">distributed computing</a> projects over the Internet for research purposes.</p><p>The project has found a total of fifteen <a href="/pages/w/105942382769832">Mersenne prime</a>s, thirteen of which were the <a href="/pages/w/115898791757507">largest known prime number</a> at their respective times of discovery. The largest known prime is 274,207,281 − 1 . This prime was discovered on September 17, 2015 by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Cooper_" class="wikipedia">Curtis Cooper</a> at the <a href="/pages/w/103757226330186">University of Central Missouri</a>.</p><p>To perform its testing, the project relies primarily on <a href="/pages/w/110916532294227">Lucas–Lehmer primality test</a>, an <a href="/pages/w/109486152404477">algorithm</a> that is both specialized to testing Mersenne primes and particularly efficient on <a href="/pages/w/107920002563545">binary</a> <a href="/pages/w/112251732119392">computer architecture</a>s. They also have a <a href="/pages/w/214081551961118">trial division</a> phase, used to rapidly eliminate Mersenne numbers with small factors which make up a large proportion of candidates. <a href="/pages/w/135515286481273">Pollard's p - 1 algorithm</a> is also used to search for larger factors.</p>