16 Sep
2008
16 Sep
'08
8:13 a.m.
Bob Baillie noticed this morning that the two recently discovered Mersenne primes have been "announced", after completing several independent checks. The exponents are 43,112,609 and 37,156,667. The larger number was found a few days earlier. The announcement is at http://www.mersenne.org/ and a press release at http://www.mersenne.org/m45and46.htm It's been two years since the last score; this double hit is a nice reward. It would be interesting to look into using the new high-end graphics cards as compute engines for GIMPS. The floating point is only 32-bit, but one card can do multiply-add steps at 150G/second. Rich