New largest known prime number is more than 23 million digits long

[Shawn Knight]

A FedEx employee in Tennessee has discovered the largest known prime number. At 23,249,425 digits long, the number is nearly a million digits longer than the previous record-holder.

The number in question was discovered using software from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a collaborative project used to search for Mersenne prime numbers. You may be familiar with one of the group’s pieces of software, Prime95, which for years has been used as a PC benchmarking application.

Jonathan Pace, a GIMPS volunteer for over 14 years, discovered the 50th known Mersenne prime on December 26, 2017. The number was calculated by multiplying the number two 77,232,917 times and then subtracting one. A Zip file of the number is available for download if you're curious.

It can be difficult to wrap one’s head around a number that’s more than 23 million digits long. According to Mersenne.org, the number is long enough to fill an entire shelf of books totaling 9,000 pages. Put another way, “If every second you were to write five digits to an inch then 54 days later you'd have a number stretching over 73 miles (118 km).” That’s almost three miles longer than the previous record prime.

Pace, a 51-year-old electrical engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee, runs Prime95 on PCs and servers that he oversees as a system administrator. The machine that discovered the new prime is powered by a quad-core Intel Core i5-6600 processor. It took the system six days to prove the number prime which has since been independently verified using four different programs on various hardware configurations.

Lead image via Robert Brook, Science Photo Library

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https://www.techspot.com/news/72616-new-largest-known-prime-number-more-than-23.html

 

[J spot]

Is he really allowed to run such software on the servers that he oversees? Unless he's the owner and doesn't care, the electric bill for whoever pays for it must be very high. Not to mention possibly reducing the computer's life span.

 

[ShagnWagn]

Is he really allowed to run such software on the servers that he oversees? Unless he's the owner and doesn't care, the electric bill for whoever pays for it must be very high. Not to mention possibly reducing the computer's life span.

Shortened life spans is a myth. I've run overclocked computers on my own plus many friend's/family's (CPU,mem,FSB,GPU, etc etc) running 100% CPU for years and years. It does not reduce the lifespan that I can tell. Many of them have been running over 10+ years. If you are stupid enough to run them to insane temperatures then maybe so, but generally errors cause the operating system to fail long before.

 

[Skyyy]

Someone check the last digit. If it's an even number or a five they're on the wrong track.

 

[Vulcanproject]

Is he really allowed to run such software on the servers that he oversees? Unless he's the owner and doesn't care, the electric bill for whoever pays for it must be very high. Not to mention possibly reducing the computer's life span.

Electromigration happens no matter what. High temperatures and higher than average spec voltages accelerate it. It just depends on how dramatically sooner a fatal flaw will manifest.

With an adequately cooled stock voltage i5 6600 it should be capable of running fully loaded for a very, very, very, very long time. High chances are it'll be a museum piece long before it fails due to electromigration.

 

[MGStraze]

Is he really allowed to run such software on the servers that he oversees? Unless he's the owner and doesn't care, the electric bill for whoever pays for it must be very high. Not to mention possibly reducing the computer's life span.

Shortened life spans is a myth. I've run overclocked computers on my own plus many friend's/family's (CPU,mem,FSB,GPU, etc etc) running 100% CPU for years and years. It does not reduce the lifespan that I can tell. Many of them have been running over 10+ years. If you are stupid enough to run them to insane temperatures then maybe so, but generally errors cause the operating system to fail long before.

Same here, have a highly overclocked 2600k running 24/7 for almost 7 years now. Even if there is a lifespan of these chips, its negligible compared to our lifespan.

 

[Capaill]

Is he really allowed to run such software on the servers that he oversees? Unless he's the owner and doesn't care, the electric bill for whoever pays for it must be very high. Not to mention possibly reducing the computer's life span.

It doesn't say that he was running the software on his work computers for 14 years. He may have been running it for 24-48 hours like many of us would do to test a new computer build. Anybody who uses Prime95 and registers with GIMPS can be the one to find a new prime number.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Once the number grew larger than 20 digits, I no longer care. I never work with numbers larger than 20 digits. I have no need in knowing prime numbers larger than those I will work with.

 

[Athlonite]

And unfortunately I don't see the point in a number being 26M in length like WTF are you going to use it for nothing that's what you're going to do with it absolutely nothing

 

[LNCPapa]

Maybe nothing today but it may prove useful for encryption in the future.