Maurice Staal, acting Managing Director of Bull Computers South Africa, is proud to announce to the South African IT industry that a team of Bull researchers at the company`s labs in Grenoble, France, led by Tony Reix, has just verified the discovery of the largest known prime number in the space of just six days. This independent validation, completed by the Bull team, enables the results of months of scientific work to be officially recognised.
The new prime was independently verified using 16 Intel Itanium 2 1.5GHz CPUs on a Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC system at the Bull Grenoble Research Centre, running the Glucas program developed by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain. At 9 808 358 digits (http://www.mersenne.org/prime10.txt), the new prime (232.582.657-1) is close to the 10 million digit prime number which is the target for many researchers worldwide.
The new prime is the 44th discovery in a special class of rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It was recently revealed in the Central Missouri State University (CMSU) Department of Communication lab, in the framework of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) distributed computing project. The new prime was discovered in just nine months, using idle time on 700 lab PCs across the university campus.
Staal met with Jean-Francois Lavignon, Director of Bull`s HPC business, in Paris last week during his visit to the Atomic Energy Centre (CEA) that houses the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.
"We extremely proud that NovaScale servers are contributing to progress in the field of scientific research, by helping to meet some of the greatest mathematical challenges."
More information on Mersenne primes
Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians. An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only divisors are one and itself. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127 corresponding to P = 2, 3, 5, and 7 respectively. There are only 44 known Mersenne primes.
Mersenne primes have been central to number theory since they were first discussed by Euclid in 350BC. The man whose name they now bear, the French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), made a famous conjecture on which values of p would yield a prime. It took 300 years and several important discoveries in mathematics to settle his conjecture. (Source: www.mersenne.org)
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