History
PrimeGrid started in June 2005 under the name Message@home and tried to decipher text fragments encrypted with MD5. Message@home was a test to port the BOINC scheduler to Perl to obtain greater portability. After a while the project attempted the RSA factoring challenge trying to factor RSA-640. After RSA-640 was factored by an outside team in November 2005, the project moved on to RSA-768. With the chance to succeed too small, it discarded the RSA challenges, was renamed to PrimeGrid, and started generating a list of the first prime numbers. At 210,000,000,000 the primegen subproject was stopped.
In June 2006, dialog started with Riesel Sieve to bring their project to the BOINC community. PrimeGrid provided PerlBOINC support and Riesel Sieve was successful in implementing their sieve as well as a prime finding (LLR) application. With collaboration from Riesel Sieve, PrimeGrid was able to implement the LLR application in partnership with another prime finding project, Twin Prime Search. In November 2006, the TPS LLR application was officially released at PrimeGrid. Less than two months later, January 2007, the record twin was found by the original manual project. PrimeGrid and TPS then advanced their search for even larger twin primes.
The summer of 2007 was very active as the Cullen and Woodall prime searches were launched. In the Fall, more prime searches were added through partnerships with the Prime Sierpinski Problem and 3*2^n-1 Search projects. Additionally, two sieves were added: the Prime Sierpinski Problem combined sieve which includes supporting the Seventeen or Bust sieve; and the combined Cullen/Woodall sieve.
In the Fall of 2007, PrimeGrid migrated its systems from PerlBOINC to standard BOINC software.
Since September 2008, PrimeGrid is also running a Proth prime sieving subproject.
In January 2010 the subproject Seventeen or Bust was added. The calculations for the Riesel problem followed in March 2010.
In addition, PrimeGrid is helping test for a record Sophie Germain prime and sieving for The Sierpinski Problem.
Read more about this topic: Prime Grid
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