A universiteitscomputer under the management of Curtis Cooper has the forty and ninth Mersenne prime discovered. The number 274.207.281-1 consists of 22.338.618 figures. The new prime number is nearly five million digits larger than the previous biggest prime number.
A Mersenne prime is a prime number that is exactly one less than the power of two, either 2n – 1. The first four n-numbers to the first four Mersenne-primes to form are 2, 3, 5, 7, respectively 3, 7, 31 and 127 is released. The new, using software from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project found number is also the new largest known prime number. This is the fourth time that Curtis Cooper, a universiteitscomputer of the university of Central Missouri in the United States is a Mersenne prime. The other three primes was found in 2005, 2006 and 2013. It is not known whether there is between the 44th and 49th Mersenne prime yet. The 29th number was discovered after the discovery of the 30th and the 31st.
The new Mersenne prime was already on 17 september 2015 discovered, but no one noticed it on 7 January 2016. How to obtain the number, it took 31 days of non-stop calculating on a pc with an Intel i7-4790 cpu. In order to verify the number is correct, carried on two others the calculation again by using Nvidia Titan Black gpu’s with CudaLucas software. it took in that case ‘only’ 2.3 days for the number to verify. With an AMD Fury X-gpu with ClLucas, it took 3.5 days. Another verification was done with MLucas software on two Intel Xeons with 18 cores on an Amazon EC2 server in 3.5 days. Recently there was a bug in Intel Skylake processors to light through the program Prime95 to run as the number 14942209 tested. Prime95 is Mersenne Resarch Group and is used in the Gimps project.
For the find praises Gimps a reward of $ 3000. A goal of Gimps is to find a Mersenne-prime number of more than 100 million digits. For this, the Electronic Frontier Foundation $ 150,000 will be made available.