New Possible Record Prime Number Found

An anonymous reader writes "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project, has probably found a new record prime number. Two verification runs have started; no errors were found in the initial calculation. The number of primes found lately, four in just over two years, is higher than previously expected. This prime is just under 10 million digits, which means that one of the participants in the project makes a good chance to obtain his or her part of the EFF prize of $100,000 for the first prime of over 10 million digits in the coming months. In 2000, one of the Gimps participants collected the $50,000 reward offered."

Comments

I can't access the site

[ReformedExCon]

I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?

Re:I can't access the site

[shrykk]

I've been playing with the math myself for primes, but what library or technique do they use to get past 32bits? It's probably simple, but I'd appreciate some help.

You'll probably find this article interesting - it covers prime finding (in C) from naive algorithms to complexe ones involving paging bit arrays in and out of memory: "Fun With Prime Numbers"

Why prime numbers ?

[Alarash]

I'm just wondering, what's the point to calculate the largest possible prime number? I mean, there are a lot of distributed computing projects that sound more... useful : Climate Prediction (Hello Katrina), research protein-related diseases or another doing wider research on human diseases. That's just to name a few projects using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networks.

So I'm not being sarcastic here, my genuine questions is : why should I spend my free computing power on calculating prime numbers instead of research to cure cancer?

Re:/.ed

[moro_666]

Their computers can calculate a prime number with 10,000,000 digits, but they can't even serve a webpage? Jeez... where are your priorities?


  Next slashdot news will be how slashdotters managed to wreck the hard disk in the server that contained the 10 million digit prime :p
Now that would be real ./ing power.

  I think it's kindof annoying to install that distributed computing software everywhere where you'd like to use the spare cpu time. My homies mess up their windows machine so often that i've stopped trying to keep anything running there (a machine online 24/7 that shows a web browser and msn for 3-4 hours a day, what a waste).

  Can't they put it in applets that i can run from their webpages ? Surely Java is a bit slower than C in algebra (not really as much as you think, on very simple math tests the difference was about 10-20% last time i measured), so a C client should be available, but a web based client which i can just run in any java enabled browser would definitely increase the userbase.