Prime95

Prime95

Prime95 26.5 running on a quad-core Windows 7 system
Developer(s) George Woltman
Stable release 26.6 / April 8, 2011; 10 months ago (2011-04-08)[1]
Preview release 27.2 alpha / December 19, 2011; 58 days ago (2011-12-19)
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Linux (MPrime), FreeBSD (MPrime)
Type Mersenne prime finder / system stability tester
License GIMPS prize terms
Website mersenne.org

Prime95 is the name of the Microsoft Windows-based software application written by George Woltman that is used by GIMPS, a distributed computing project dedicated to finding new Mersenne prime numbers.

MPrime is the Linux command-line interface version of Prime95, to be be run in a text terminal or in a terminal emulator window as a remote shell client. It is identical to the Windows version, except it lacks a graphical user interface.

Although most of the GIMPS software's source code is publicly available, it is technically not free software as users must abide by the project's distribution terms if the software is used to discover a prime number with at least 100,000,000 decimal digits and wins the $150,000 bounty offered by the EFF.[2] As such, a user who uses Prime95 to discover a qualifying prime number would not be able to claim the prize directly. A free software package would not have this restriction.

The code that is used to generate checksums is not publicly available due to security reasons.[3]

Contents

Finding Mersenne primes by distributed computing

As of September 2009, 13 new Mersenne prime numbers have been found by the network of participants, and, on average, a new Mersenne prime is discovered approximately every year. Scott Kurowski wrote the Internet PrimeNet Server that supports the Prime95/MPrime software on GIMPS, one of the earliest grid computing projects, researching Mersenne prime numbers, to demonstrate Entropia-distributed computing software, a company he founded in 1997.

Processing power

A table of selected benchmarks is provided below. The complete list can be found at the official GIMPS website.[4]

Comparison of CPU core power Frequency Cores FFT Trial factoring TDP
Prime95 benchmark[4][5] (per core) 2048k 4096k 65-bit
Platform CPU model MHz ms ms ms Watts
Intel Atom 330 1600 2 621 1166 46 8
Intel Atom D510 1664 2 585.91 1954.40 25.65 13
Intel Pentium III 1151 1 438.10 922.58 50.59 30
AMD Athlon 1054 1 457.40 774.49 56.08 ?
AMD Fusion E-350 1596 2 222.03 491.02 15.18 18
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1640 1 201.21 448.28 32.80 ~60
Intel Pentium 4 3078 1 72.40 162.02 14.91 86
AMD Phenom II X4 3414 4 34.86 76.27 4.59 125
Intel Core2 Duo E8600 3334 2 34.15 73.07 4.89 65
Sandy Bridge Pentium G620T 2159 2 41.09 72.53 4.99 35
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 3310 6 32.68 69.54 3.85 125
Intel Core i5-2500K 3330 4 23.94 53.24 3.49 95
Intel Core i7-2600K 3463 4 21.75 45.35 3.67 95

Use for stress testing

Over the years, Prime95 has become extremely popular among PC enthusiasts and overclockers as a stability testing utility. It includes a "Torture Test" mode designed specifically for testing PC subsystems for errors in order to help ensure the correct operation of Prime95 on that system. This is important because each iteration of the Lucas-Lehmer depends on the previous one; if one iteration is incorrect, so will be the entire primality test.

The stress-test feature in Prime95 can be configured to better test various components of the computer by changing the fast fourier transform (FFT) size. Three pre-set configurations are available: Small FFTs and In-place FFTs, and Blend. Small and In-place modes primarily test the FPU and the caches of the CPU, whereas the Blend mode tests everything, including the memory.

By selecting Custom, the user can gain further control of the configuration. For example, by selecting 8-8 kB as the FFT size, the program stresses primarily the CPU. By selecting 2048-4096 kB and unchecking the "Run FFTs in-place" checkbox, providing the maximum amount of RAM free in the system, the program tests the memory and the chipset. If the amount of memory to use option is set too high, then the system will start using the paging file and the test will not stress the memory.

On an absolutely stable system, Prime95 would run indefinitely. If an error occurs, at which point the stress test would terminate, this would indicate that the system may be unstable. There is an ongoing debate about terms "stable" and "Prime-stable", as Prime95 often fails before the system becomes unstable or crashes in any other application. This is because Prime95 is designed to subject the CPU to an incredibly intense workload, and to halt when it encounters even one minor error, whereas most normal applications do not stress the CPU anywhere near as much, and will continue to operate unless they encounter a fatal error.

In the overclocking community, a rule of thumb is often used to determine how long to run Prime95: test the CPU (8 kB FFT) for 10 hours and the memory (4096 kB FFT) for 10 hours, and if the system passes, there is a high chance that it is stable. Twenty-four hours of testing is recommended to be sure, as errors may show up after 16 or more hours of testing (compared to, say, just four hours of testing).[6] Moreover, a large proportion of system overclockers and enthusiasts favor Prime95 over other benchmarking suites because Prime95 pushes the CPU's floating point units extremely hard, causing the CPU to become extremely hot. In addition, Prime95 stresses a computer far more than the majority of software based torture-suites. The nature of this is because the operating system usually shuts down the floating-point unit when unused by other programs, whereas Prime95 is well-optimized to continuously and effectively thread the FPU, causing it to be deeply pipelined, thereby generating significantly more heat because of elevated power consumption under the massive workload conditions. In CPUs which are not adequately cooled, errors are likely to occur. Prime95 also constantly accesses main memory at up to 60 MB per second. This constant activity will detect memory problems that other programs will not.

Lastly, power supply units of any machine running Prime95 are subject to the consistent ramifications of such harsh conditions. Power must be maintained clean, while providing adequate voltage, particularly to the CPU, RAM, and chipsets (mainboard chipsets such as the Northbridge where the memory controller may or may not reside; see Athlon 64 or Intel Core i7 for on-die memory controllers) to provide peak performance while maintaining stability. Cray Research used programs similar to Prime95 for over a decade for the purpose of stability testing.[7]

Limits

Version 24 and older of Prime95 cannot test Mersenne numbers beyond 2^{79,300,000} -1.[8] This is slightly shorter than a 24 million digit number. Newer versions of Prime95 (version 25 and 26) can handle Mersenne numbers up to the limit 2^{596,000,000} -1.[9]

Prime95 does not fully stress all processor threads when the threads number is more than 64 in Windows, or 32 for the 32-bit version. Windows will manage the processors in groups when the number beyond 64. Each group will only have maximum of 64. Prime95 will only load into one processor group.

Release history

More details are located in the whatsnew.txt file.

Color Meaning
Red Former release
Pink Former test release
Green Current stable release
Blue Future release
Gold Current test release
Version Release date Significant changes
8 Trial factoring speeds improved
10 Self-test added, various changes to menus
12 Speed increased, memory usage decreased, more self-tests and error checks added, exponent limit increased to 2,630,000
12.1 Command line arguments added
12.2
12.3 Backup files are now generated every 30 minutes
12.4 Improvements in trial factoring and backup file generation
13.1 More FFTs added
13.2
14.0 Exponent limit increased to 5,250,000
14.1 Pentium code improved
14.2 Trial factoring improved
14.3 Pentium Pro optimizations added
15.0 Prime95 can now automatically obtain assignments, configuration file system reworked
15.1
15.2 New HTTP protocol, support for Windows 95 services
15.3
15.4 More support for firewalls and proxies
16.1 Exponent limit increased to 20,500,000, factoring limit increased to 64 bits
16.2
16.3 Safety check added to prevent accidental credit transfer
16.4 Prime95 now shows progress in percentage
16.5 Networking code updated
17.0 Support for double checking
17.1 Prime95 can now do ECM factoring for numbers of the form 2n + 1
17.2 ECM speeds improved for 2n + 1
18.0
18.1 April 13, 1999 Change added to allow server to distinguish versions
19.0 Exponents of up to 79,300,000 supported, P-1 factoring added, save files for ECM factoring
19.1 AMD K6 optimizations
19.2 December 17, 1999
20.0 ECM and P-1 improvements
20.1 P-1 improvements
20.1 P-1 improvements
20.2
20.3
20.4
20.5
20.6 June 16, 2000
21.2 SSE2 support
21.3 Ability to skip redundant P-1 factoring
21.4 September 23, 2001 Torture test improved
22.1 Server and network code improved
22.2 Assignment optimizations
22.3 More FFT sizes, better error checking
22.4
22.5
22.6 Windows service support
22.7 SSE2 support for trial factoring on Pentium 4
22.8 August 15, 2002[10] Crossover FFTs
22.9 September 7, 2002[11] Windows tray UI improvements
22.10 October 8, 2002[12] More support for automatic start at bootup
22.11
22.12
22.13 December 29, 2002
23.1 February 10, 2003[13] SSE2 optimizations
23.2 February 20, 2003[14] More SSE2 optimizations
23.3 April 29, 2003[15] More SSE2 optimizations
23.4 More SSE2 optimizations
23.5 More error-checking
23.6 July 15, 2003[16]
23.7 September 6, 2003[17] Changes in memory settings
23.8
23.9 Reduced memory requirement in torture tests
24.6 December 7, 2004[18] AMD Athlon CPU optimizations
24.9
24.10 Support for 64-bit Windows
24.11 March 30, 2005[19] AMD CPU optimizations
24.12 June 8, 2005[20] SSE2 optimizations
24.13 July 5, 2005 Different FFT implementations for certain processors
24.14 August 5, 2005[21]
24.15
25.3 June 16, 2007[22] True multi-core support, added PRP tests, various other changes
25.4 August 10, 2007[23]
25.5 September 24, 2007[24]
25.6 December 22, 2007[25]
25.7 October 7, 2008[26]
25.8 December 14, 2008[27]
25.9 March 16, 2009[28] Speed improvements
25.10 May 3, 2009[29] Mac OS X and FreeBSD GUI support
25.11 July 14, 2009 Faster PRP tests
26.2 September 14, 2010[30] Optimized FFT code for many architectures; file size is greatly increased as a result
26.3 October 13, 2010[31]
26.4 November 15, 2010 Support of up to 64 cores (for 64-bit systems)
26.5 February 23, 2011
26.6 April 8, 2011[32]
27.1 alpha December 5, 2011[33] Intel AVX support
27.2 alpha December 19, 2011[34] Includes all FFT lengths; first Linux/MPrime test version
TBD TBD GPU support

See also

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ Cooperative Computing Awards
  3. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=47191&postcount=16
  4. ^ a b Prime95/MPrime benchmark reports
  5. ^ sili.net List of Prime95/MPrime benchmarks
  6. ^ http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=335813
  7. ^ http://www.xs4all.nl/~mfvl/prime/readme.txt
  8. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20080606075920/http://www.starqwest.org/page4.html
  9. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?p=258001&highlight=596000000#post258001
  10. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7191&postcount=1
  11. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7193&postcount=3
  12. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7194&postcount=4
  13. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7212&postcount=22
  14. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7217&postcount=26
  15. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=7238&postcount=48
  16. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=837
  17. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=1083
  18. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=3387
  19. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=3934
  20. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=4181
  21. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=4482
  22. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=8431
  23. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=8981
  24. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=9349
  25. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=9779
  26. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=10746
  27. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=11132
  28. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=11602
  29. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=11825
  30. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=13887
  31. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=14055
  32. ^ http://mersenne.org/freesoft/default.php
  33. ^ http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?p=281148
  34. ^ http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=282856&postcount=63

External links