Thursday 5 January 2006

VLP (Very Large Primes)

Worlds largest prime number identified, aka Grid Discovers Largest Known Prime Number or Distributed computing enjoys prime success
The number is expressed as 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1, a 9,152,052-digit numeral. Reportedly, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) found another VLP (Very Large Prime) back in February, but neither reached the 10 million digits needed for an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) $100,000 prize.
Note: The reporting seems to have its own number problem, having described the computers/power used as: "an international grid of about 70,000 computers", "the collective power of more than 200,000 computers", and "more than 700 computers ", as well as about 4,500 years solo work on a brand new Pentium 4 computer.

You can get your very own copy as a large text file, too.

More raw information is available at www.mersenne.org and www.mersenneforum.org

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