Michael Cameron, a 20-year-old participant in the worldwide mathematics research project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered the largest known prime number using his PC connected to the Entropia Mersenne Grid.
The new Mersenne prime, expressed as 2 to the 13,466,917th power minus 1, contains 4,053,946 digits, and was discovered November 14th. It belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called Mersenne primes. The discovery marks only the 39th known Mersenne prime, named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who first studied the numbers. Mersenne primes are most relevant to number theory and have practical implications for encryption and computational benchmarking.
Cameron used an 800 MHz AMD T-Bird PC running part-time to find the number prime - with help from GIMPS' 130,000 volunteer participants and more than 210,000 PCs.
Entropia and Mersenne.org run GIMPS jointly. Entropia created the distributed computing technology and maintains the global Grid that harnesses spare CPU cycles to accelerate the discovery of these rare numbers. Mersenne.org developed the application software that runs on this Grid and performs the calculations to discover these prime numbers. GIMPS started running on the Entropia Grid in 1997, making it one of the first Internet Grid projects available for public participation.
The discovery is the fifth record prime found by the GIMPS project, and the third discovered using Entropia's Grid for distributed computing. Entropia's Grid performs 2 teraflops (a million million million calculations per second) around the clock while the participants use their PCs for all the things they normally do. Historically, the discovery of large prime numbers has required supercomputers.
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