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New Mersenne Prime Discovered, Largest Known Prime Number: 2^74,207,281 - 1 (mersenne.org)

Posted by Soulskill on from the that's-my-phone-number dept.

Dave Knott writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits. The same GIMPS software recently uncovered a flaw in Intel's latest Skylake CPUs, and its global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. The prime is almost 5 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 49th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find.

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PrimeCoins by Livius · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obviously prime posts start with the second one.

  2. Re:Rare Primes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not so much that Mersenne numbers are much more likely to be prime than other odd numbers of their size. It's that there is a special-purpose primality test just for Mersenne numbers that is tons more efficient than verifying other primes of similar size.

  3. It's small. by Kwyj1b0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's still smaller than the box Amazon Prime uses to send me a toothpick.

  4. 22,338,618 digits by mejustme · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How "big" is 22,338,618 digits? Text file containing the prime is 22.8 MiB in size. http://www.mersenne.org/primes...