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”
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