Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by p5a0u9l 611 days ago
Are there statistics on the scale of compute available to GIMPS for this search? Is there any evidence that by crowdsourcing the clients, we are searching faster than, eg, a dedicated cluster financed by a government or a corporation? What is the impact of GIMPS as a distributed problem solving tool? Like, if there was a practical application, how much money would it take to exceed GIMPS throughput, that curious people provide for free?

I’d like it to be astronomical, but given the niche of this, and the low cost of cloud compute, the answer is predicable depressing, like, “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput”
2 comments
areyousure 610 days ago
https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ suggests 127 PFlop/s average over the last month, which would put it in the top 10 on https://top500.org/lists/top500/2024/06/

I used a random estimate online for computing cost which had 5.6e17 Flops per dollar on A100s gives about a dollar every 4.4 seconds or ~$7 million per year.

Sadly, I do not vouch for the correctness of any part of this, though I did try.

link
mpreda 610 days ago
> “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput”

I think you may be wrong by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

link