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em99010pepe
09-11-2006, 05:03 PM
Lightning strikes twice. On September 4, 2006, in the same room just a few feet away from their last find, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone's CMSU team broke their own world record, discovering the 44th known Mersenne prime, 232,582,657-1. The new prime at 9,808,358 digits is 750,000 digits larger than their previous record prime found last December. However, the new prime falls short of the 10 million digits required for GIMPS to claim the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award.

With five record primes found in less than 3 years, GIMPS has been on an incredible lucky streak. Never before have Mersenne primes been bunched so closely together. When looking at the exponents, we expect only 1.78 Mersenne primes between powers of two, and prior to 2003, a maximum of 3 Mersenne primes were found between powers of two. The last 5 Mersenne prime exponents all fell between 224 and 225 -- and we haven't finished testing all the exponents in that range!

The new prime was independently verified in 6 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.

Dr. Cooper and Dr. Boone could not have made this discovery alone. In recognition of contributions made by the project coordinators and the tens of thousands GIMPS volunteers, credit for this new discovery goes to "Cooper, Boone, Woltman, Kurowski, et al". The discovery is the tenth record prime for the GIMPS project. Join now and you could find the next record-breaking prime! You could even win some cash.

Perfectly Scientific, Dr. Crandall's company which developed the FFT algorithm used by GIMPS, will make a poster you can order containing the entire 9.8 million digit number. It is kind of pricey because accurately printing an over-sized poster in 1-point font is not easy! This makes a cool present for the serious math nut in your family.

Source (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm)