GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered all 14 of the largest known Mersenne primes. Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk It is only the 48th known Mersenne primeĮver discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. The new prime number is a member of a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes.

The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award. University of Central Missouri are the largest individual contributors to the project. The new primality proof took 39 days of non-stop computing on one of the university's PCs. UCLA held the record until University of Central Missouri reclaimed the Computers at UCLA broke that record in 2008 with aġ2,978,189 digit prime number. Their first record prime was discovered in 2005,Įclipsed by their second record in 2006. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. Peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global 'grassroots supercomputing' ĭr. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, hasġ7,425,170 digits (warning: 8MB zip file). Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer.

On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 2 57,885,161-1, was discovered on 2 57,885,161-1 is now the Largest Known Prime.

2 gimps