Cooperative Project Reports New Top Prime Number

19 May, 2004 at 1:23pm ET Article published in Tech

A group that has harnessed the collective power of thousands of computers says it has found the largest known prime number, breaking a record it set just half a year earlier.

A prime number is evenly divisible only by 1 and itself. A Mersenne prime number, the target of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has more arcane requirements. The group relies on volunteers running a program in the background to search for them. One member of the effort appeared to have found the newest record-holder on May 15. GIMPS organizer George Woltman said in an e-mail interview Tuesday that the result is being verified with separate testing over the next two to four weeks and, if confirmed, would be the largest known prime and the 41st Mersenne prime.

This demonstrates the ever increasing power of distributed computing. Congrats to the GIMP project. -KingFish

Source: ZDNet

Comments

19 May 2004 ~ 3:55pm EyesOnly Nice. though i wish they would fold instead.
19 May 2004 ~ 6:19pm Dexter Told us everything except the what the number is...! What the heck good is that? Trivia man, I want trivia!

Dexter...
19 May 2004 ~ 6:24pm Geeky1 "In November, a GIMPS member found the previous record holder, a prime number with 6.3 million digits. At that time, GIMPS was powered by 211,000 computers run by 60,000 volunteers."

No, no, you don't want to know the number. You just think you do. The poor P4 in my laptop couldn't handle displaying that many characters at once.
19 May 2004 ~ 6:57pm keto I thought prime was about 28 or so....
19 May 2004 ~ 7:03pm mmonnin Hehe yeah he is. Man Brian you look young for 63 billion or w/e.
19 May 2004 ~ 7:55pm Thrax The project is named GIMP for a reason