3 ms·
I think you misread how the previous prime was found: "4D. The Lucas-Lehmer test began on Sun Jul 20 12:33:46 2008 PDT and concluded on Sat Aug 23 00:29:27 200
by ac29 12y ago
I think you misread how the previous prime was found:
"4D. The Lucas-Lehmer test began on Sun Jul 20 12:33:46 2008 PDT and concluded on Sat Aug 23 00:29:27 2008 PDT. That's a total of 33 1/2 days. The Dell Optiplex was the only computer used to initially prove this candidate prime. However, the computer was part of GIMPS' "PrimeNet" network of roughly 75,000 computers testing other Mersenne number candidates."
It didnt take one computer 33 days, it took 75,000 computers searching simultaneously to find a prime.
edit: The next largest prime, at 17 million digits, took a further 5 years of searching on a network that has over 100 TFLOP/s of compute power [1].
[1] http://www.mersenne.org/primes/ http://www.mersenne.org/primes/
- throwaway86321 12y agoThe choice of a Dell Optiplex business desktop PC for a month-long calculation in 2008 is interesting for historical reasons. A decade before that, Sun workstations that cost $30k each were used for long-running engineering tests like chip verification, while an Optiplex is less than 10% of that.
- dekhn 12y agoWell, in 1998, I was running a dual-processor Dell Optiplex at 400MHz for month-long simulations; it cost $5000 at the time. but yeah, most people around me were buying $25k SGIs that had about half the oomph of my machine. I think that was the year it became clear Intel was going to get enough floating point and cache to be competitive with the RISC UNIX systems.
- septemberSW0 12y agoThis is interesting to me. Are there libraries for storing and doing math on floating point numbers with 17+ million digits?