41st Known Mersenne Prime Reported!!

[ixfd64]

I did a search for "24036583" on Yahoo and Google, and nothing relevant came up. Yet.

[Uncwilly]

I tried: new prime largest found -- Not much. Although Wilipedia has it in the article on primes already. Leave it to the open source folks....

[Prime Monster]

I have updated the New to GIMPS? Start here! thread with new information in connection with M41. I would like to get some feedback on the thread, suggestions for additions, corrections, extranous info etc.

Keep in mind that the thread is meant for possible new recruits to GIMPS, and as such should entice people to start with GIMPS.

PM

[Prime Monster]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I tried: new prime largest found -- Not much. Although Wikipedia has it in the article on primes already. Leave it to the open source folks....

It has been posted on the Ars Food Court Site (by me ), the common site for all Ars Technica Distributed Computing teams

PM

PS: The article is an unadaulturated pimpage for Team Prime Rib

[Uncwilly]

Wikipedia

[Mike]

I was looking on the Guinness World Records site (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/) today, and I noticed that SETI is in there for the largest computation... Have we beat that yet/already? They say it is 890 billion billion floating point operations. I don't know how that compares to teraflops :P

Also, why not contact them to include the largest known prime number? They just might print it in the book... Millions will be reading it...

[Prime Monster]

Originally Posted by Mike

I was looking on the Guinness World Records site (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/) today, and I noticed that SETI is in there for the largest computation... Have we beat that yet/already? They say it is 890 billion billion floating point operations. I don't know how that compares to teraflops :P

Also, why not contact them to include the largest known prime number? They just might print it in the book... Millions will be reading it...

I believe George or Josh will have to report the new Mersenne prime to the Guinness World Records. I think it would be an easy entry, as all the facts are there and verified mathematically.

PM

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by Mike

I was looking on the Guinness World Records site (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/) today, and I noticed that SETI is in there for the largest computation... Have we beat that yet/already? They say it is 890 billion billion floating point operations. I don't know how that compares to teraflops :P

Also, why not contact them to include the largest known prime number? They just might print it in the book... Millions will be reading it...

8.9*10^20 floating point operations (Why can't they use scientific notation. Its much simpler ) is a measure of how many computations have been done, not a measure of how fast they are being done. But to put that into perspective, it would take about 2.17 years, running at 13 Teraflops, to reach that number of computations.

Anyway, according to http://mersenne.org/ips/stats.html:

"Between 23 November 1997 and 26 May 2004, PrimeNet has handled 4,223,723,933 P90 machine-hours (481,830 P90 machine-years) of Mersenne number tests."

This gives a total of about 5.0*10^20. However, that is an underestimate, because it doesn't take into account all the computations that GIMPS made before November 23, 1997 and doesn't take into account results that were not reported via Primenet. Still, I doubt that these two factors would be enough to bring the total up to 8.9*10^20.

[ixfd64]

A 890 million teraflop supercomputer would be nice.

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by ixfd64

A 890 million teraflop supercomputer would be nice.

You mean, an 890 exaflop supercomputer.

Anyway, I've just looked up the most up-to-date statistics on SETI, and it seems that they've gone WAY beyond 8.9*10^20 computations. That record was as of July, 2001.

Today, SETI has exceeded 5.0*10^21 computations. Their speed over the last 24 hours is 72.266 Teraflops, over 5.3 times faster than Primenet.

Furthermore, they have about half a million users who have returned at least one result in the last 4 weeks.

[aaronl]

Originally Posted by Prime Monster

It has been posted on the Ars Food Court Site (by me ), the common site for all Ars Technica Distributed Computing teams

PM

PS: The article is an unadaulturated pimpage for Team Prime Rib

The first prize has already been awarded and we are working on. On Wednesday November 14 2001, one lucky computer, found M39, the current largest Mersenne prime number. A Mersenne number is defined by the expansion of 2p-1, where p must itself be a prime number. This record prime: 2^13,466,917-1, is 4,053,946 digits long!