GIMPS distributed-computing project finds the 49th Mersenne prime
by from Techreport on (#11D20)
The more prime numbers we find, the harder it gets to find a new one. The latest prime number, discovered using the free Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) software, is 22,338,618 digits long, over five million digits longer than the last one discovered. The new prime, 274,207,281-1, is also only the 49th known Mersenne prime. The number is so large that a text file containing it occupies 22 MB.
As hardware geeks, we were immediately curious about the machines responsible for the discovery. For the initial proof, Dr. Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri ran GIMPS on a PC running an Intel Core i7-4790 for 31 days straight. His proof was ...