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Largest Known Prime, 48th Known Mersenne Prime Found!!
http://www.mersenne.org/
On January 25th, prolific GIMPS contributor Dr. Curtis Cooper discovered the 48th known Mersenne prime, 257,885,161-1, a 17,425,170 digit number. This find shatters the previous record prime number of 12,978,189 digits, also a GIMPS prime, discovered over 4 years ago. The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award.
Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. This is the third record prime for Dr. Cooper and his University. Their first record prime was discovered in 2005, eclipsed by their second record in 2006. Computers at UCLA broke that record in 2008. UCLA held the record until Dr. Cooper and the University of Central Missouri reclaimed the world record with this discovery.
While Dr. Cooper's computer found the record prime, the discovery would not have been possible without all the GIMPS volunteers that sifted through numerous non-prime candidates. GIMPS founder George Woltman and PrimeNet creator Scott Kurowski thank and congratulate all the GIMPS members that made this discovery possible.
Mersenne primes are extremely rare, only 48 are known. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 14 Mersenne primes. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the history of Mersenne primes as well as the largest known primes.
The primality proof took 39 days of non-stop computing on one of the University of Central Missouri's PCs. To establish there were no errors during the proof, the new prime was independently verified using different programs running on different hardware. Jerry Hallett verified the prime using CUDALucas running on a NVidia GPU in 3.6 days. Dr. Jeff Gilchrist verified the find using the standard GIMPS software on an Intel i7 CPU in 4.5 days. Finally, Serge Batalov ran Ernst Mayer's MLucas software on a 32-core server in 6 days (resource donated by Novartis IT group) to verify the new prime.
You can read a little more in the short press release.