Discovery of the Largest Known Prime Number

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has discovered the largest known prime number: 2^25,964,951 - 1. It is 7,816,230 decimal digits long and is the 42nd known Mersenne prime.

Dr. Martin Nowak from Germany identified the new prime with 50 days of computing on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. The result was independently verified. Nowak runs the GIMPS software on 24 PCs.

GIMPS runs on a world-wide distributed Internet computing system whose current sustained throughput is approximately 16 trillion floating point operations per second. It is one of the most powerful computers in the world. It is composed of the shared computing resources of thousands of ordinary PCs.

Posted: Saturday - February 26, 2005 at 01:58 PM

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Discovery of the Largest Known Prime Number

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