Prime Monster racks brains for prime number

FORGET THOSE SETI ALIEN SEARCHING MACHINES -- and check out the Prime Monster site.

A group of techies have built what they term a small supercomputer to find Mersenne Prime numbers, and the rack at the site, built from bare mobos, a bunch of CPUs, memory and network cards runs Linux and Netboot.

The machine is part of the Gimps project and this is being described as the "wet dream" for Intel PR dudes. [Yukk, Ed.]

In fact, both Intel and AMD CPUs are used, and the rack is home built.

The guys say they want to get the most bang for the buck as possible, and so are overclocking Mr Prime Monster for all it's worth.

Stats, pix, the why and wherefore and more can all be found here.

Don't forget that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering $100,000 for the discovery of a 10 million digit Mersenne prime, either... µ