[ExI] gimps

[spike]

It's been a long time since I posted anything about GIMPS, the Great
Internet Mersenne Prime Search. We have had some interesting milestones
recently.  A couple days ago, GIMPS exceeded 100 teraFLOPS for almost 12
hours.  Sustained throughput these days tends to be around 75-ish TFLOPS,
which is interesting because when I started GIMPS in 1998, throughput then
was around 75-ish GFLOPS on a good day.  So we have gained a prefix in 14
years.  I recall when we broke 100 MFLOPS for the first time, and we were
popping virtual Champaign corks and making extrapolations and predictions.
Now we have about 20 times as many computers working on the problem and each
one is about 50 times more powerful in ops per second.

 

It has been a little over three years since the 47th known prime was
discovered, after the mind-boggling cluster which is still driving people
nuts (fortunately only the kind of people who get driven nuts by this kind
of thing.)

 

I found in my archives a poll that was made back in  2005: What is the
highest speed GIMPS will ever attain?

 

A)     Already reached its peak, <21 TFLOPS

B)      Most growth is over, 21-30 TFLOPS

C)      Still considerable growth ahead, 30-50 TFLOPS

D)     Great things still to come, 50-100 TFLOPS

E)      You haven't seen anything yet, >100 TFLOPS

 

The poll results were A=0%, B=12%, C=10%, D=19% and E=59%

 

So now the Great-things-ers are currently right, but the Haven't-seeners
might justifiably interpret the recent results as vindicating their soaring
optimism.  I was one of the Haven't-seeners.

 

While we go on about technological change slowing, note that my own memories
are still fresh of the time when a typical computer could do only a fiftieth
of what the typical computer does today.  The computers blew our minds back
then.  Huh.  You young people don't know how good life is today.

 

spike

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