Welcome to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search! To use this program you must agree to the prize rules at http://www.mersenne.org/prize.htm In case you ever forget, the URL is http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm. My email address is woltman@alum.mit.edu. For networking questions, contact Scott Kurowski's technical support team at primenet@mersenne.org. FILE LIST --------- readme.txt This file. prime95.exe The program to factor and run Lucas-Lehmer tests on Mersenne numbers. prime95.chm The help file in HTML help format. whatsnew.txt A list of new features in prime95.exe. stress.txt A discussion of issues relating to stress testing a computer. undoc.txt A list of formerly undocumented and unsupported features. prime.ini A file containing your preferences. The menu choices and dialog boxes are used to change your preferences. local.ini Like prime.ini, this file contains more preferences. The reason there are two files is discussed later. worktodo.ini A list of exponents the program will be factoring and/or Lucas-Lehmer testing. results.txt Prime95.exe writes its results to this file. prime.log A text file listing all messages that have been sent to the PrimeNet server. prime.spl A binary file of messages that have not yet been sent to the PrimeNet server. pNNNNNNN & Intermediate files produced by prime95.exe to resume qNNNNNNN computation where it left off. mNNNNNNN Intermediate files produced during P-1 factoring. WHAT IS THIS PROGRAM? --------------------- This program is used to find Mersenne Prime numbers. See http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/mersenne.shtml for a good description of Mersenne primes. Mersenne numbers can be proved composite (not prime) by either finding a factor or by running a Lucas-Lehmer primality test. INSTRUCTIONS ------------ There are two ways to use this program. The automatic way uses a central server, which we call the PrimeNet server, to get work to do and report your results. Anyone with Internet access, including AOL, CompuServe, and dial-up ISP users should use this method. You do not need a permanent connection to the Internet. The second method is the manual method. It requires a little more work and monitoring. I recommend this for computers with no Internet access or with some kind of firewall problem that prevents the automatic method from working. If you are running this program at your place of employment, you must first GET PERMISSION from your network administrator, boss, or both. This is especially true if you are installing the software on several machines. Many companies have policies that prohibit running unauthorized software. Violating that policy could result in termination and/or prosecution. INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE AUTOMATIC METHOD ------------------------------------- 1) Run the setup program, p95setup.exe or download and unzip prime95.zip. You've probably done this already since you are reading this file. 2) Connect to the Internet. 3) Run prime95.exe. You will see 4 dialog boxes: 3a) In the welcome dialog box, choose "Join GIMPS!". 3b) In the second dialog box, enter your name and email address. Optionally enter a user ID, password, and computer ID. If you are using several computers, use the same user ID and password but a unique computer ID on each machine. An easy-to-remember user ID will be helpful if you plan to visit the PrimeNet server's web page to view reports on your progress. If you do not enter a user ID or if you pick a user ID that is already in use, then the server will assign a user ID. 3c) In the third dialog box, fill in roughly how many hours a day you leave your computer running. Click OK. 3d) In the fourth dialog box, leave the "Use Primenet..." checkbox checked. Do not turn this checkbox off even if you disconnect from the Internet. Check the "Use a dial-up..." checkbox if you use a modem to connect to the Internet. Note that prime95 will not dial-up to connect to the Internet, rather it waits for a time when you are already connected to contact the server. Click OK. Prime95 will now contact the PrimeNet server to get some work for your computer to do. 4a) If a proxy server is the causing connection troubles, see the later section on "SETTING UP A PROXY SERVER". 4b) If the program will not connect to the server, then you will have to use the manual method described below. 5) Disable screen savers or use the "blank screen" screen saver. If this is not practical, consider raising prime95's priority to 4 or 5. The "Start at Bootup" menu choice (on by default) will run prime95 every time you boot your computer. MANUAL METHOD INSTRUCTIONS -------------------------- 1) Use the Web (http://mersenne.org/ips/manualtests.html) to create a userid for yourself and to get a set of exponents to work on. Alternatively, you can get some work from http://www.mersenne.org/range2.htm. Copy these exponents to a file called worktodo.ini 2) Run prime95.exe. You will see 4 dialog boxes: 2a) In the welcome dialog box, choose "Join GIMPS!". 2b) In the second dialog box, enter your name and email address. Click OK. 2c) In the third dialog box, fill in roughly how many hours a day you leave your computer running. Click OK. 2d) In the fourth dialog box, uncheck "Use PrimeNet to get work and report results", click OK. 3) Disable screen savers or use the "blank screen" screen saver. If this is not practical, consider raising prime95's priority to 4 or 5. 4) Once a month or when done with your exponents, use the web pages again to send the file "results.txt" to the PrimeNet server. It is important to do this so the exponents you are testing are not reassigned to someone else. The "Start at Bootup" menu choice (on by default) will run prime95 every time you boot your computer. NOTES ----- Running prime95 may significantly increase your electric bill. The amount depends on your computer and your local electric rates. It can take many CPU weeks to test a large Mersenne number. This program can be safely interrupted by using the ESC key to write intermediate results to disk. This program also saves intermediate results to disk every 30 minutes in case there is a power failure. To fully utilize a dual processor machine, you must run two copies of prime95.exe. Run one copy of prime95 as described above. Run the second copy of prime95.exe with the -A1 command line argument. Make sure the second copy also has the "Start at Bootup" option set. Dual processor machines can also improve performance by setting processor affinity. Use the Advanced/Affinity dialog box to do this. You can compare your computer's speed with other users by checking the site http://www.mersenne.org/bench.htm. If you are much slower than comparable machines, there are several utilities available (such as TaskInfo2002, http://www.iarsn.com/) that can find programs that are stealing prime95's CPU cycles. You can get a report of your PrimeNet server account status on the web (http://mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml). Type your UserID and password into the web form, and click "Get Account Report". You can get your UserID and password from the Test/User Information dialog box. Information about running a local PrimeNet server is also available. See http://mersenne.org/primenet. If you have any questions about the PrimeNet server, you can send e-mail to primenet@mersenne.org. Before testing an exponent, the program may perform an hour long self-test to make sure the Lucas-Lehmer code is running properly on your system. If this hour long test is interrupted it will restart from the beginning when prime95 resumes testing. If you have overclocked your machine, I recommend running the torture test for a couple of days. The longer you run the torture test the greater the chance that you will uncover an error caused by overheating or overstressed memory. Depending on the exponent being tested, the program may decide that it would be wise to invest some time checking for small factors before running a Lucas-Lehmer test. You can configure this program to have different properties at different times of the day and/or to not run during certain times of the day. Unfortunately, you must manual edit the prime.ini file. Let's say you want to install the program on a friend's machine and he runs a screen saver at night. He also runs a disk defragmenter at midnight on weekdays. This prime.ini file will run the program at a higher priority than his screen saver at night and on weekends. It also sleeps for an hour when his defragmenter starts running. Finally, at night fewer save files are generated to allow his disk to stay powered down longer. UserID=foo Other prime.ini entries Time=1-5/8:30-17:30 Priority=1 DiskWriteTime=30 Time=1-5/1:00-8:30,1-5/17:30-24:00,6-7/0:00-24:00 Priority=5 DiskWriteTime=240 The 1-5 refers to days of the week, with Monday=1 and Sunday=7. The time portion refers to the hours of the day based on a 24-hour clock. You do not need to specify days of the week (e.g. Time=1-7/0:00-8:00 is the same as Time=0:00-8:00). Unpredictable results will occur if there are overlapping time intervals. Also note that any options that appear in the Time= sections should not appear earlier in the prime.ini file and you can no longer edit these options from the user interface. SETTING UP A PROXY SERVER ------------------------- For the latest information on this and other networking issues visit the FAQ at http://mersenne....
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