Largest Primes

Anyone heard of GIMPS, the Great Mersenne Prime Search? Since the creation of RSA Encryption, everyone is interested in Primes. There is a prize for the first person to find a 10 million digit primes. The record so far was 2^(32582657)-1, 9808358 digits in 2006. You can download their software to your computer as part of a distributed computing project, the program runs when your not using your computer to calculate new primes, and if your computer finds a prize winning prime, you share the prize.

They recently made news, here is the story in The Guardian. I ran the program for a while -- at a former job.

Here's the link to a yahoo story from a couple of days ago...


UCLA group discovers humungous prime number - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080927/ap_on_fe_st/prime_number_prize