Need an assessment and help regarding prime numbers.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by TimoKinnunen

Biggest known Mersenne prime number has 24 million digits. With a database table having three columns [blah blah], it is possible to bypass biggest known prime number in acceptable time with a powerful super-computer.

Bhaaaaa... you have to pay the coffee I spelt on the keyboard.
You want to do that by trial division?

With a computer sieving a million billions trillions quadrillions primes per pico-second (to be clear, that is a computer larger than the size of the earth, and probably done by quantum technology, filtering 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 primes every second (that is a 1 followed by 6+9+12+15+12 zeroes) you still need about 10^12300000 years to finish it... (that is a 1 followed by about 12 million zeros, in base ten).

People dont really realize how large these numbers are.