Seattle's Josh Findley, member of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project, has discovered the world's largest known prime number.

The record-breaking number was found in mid-May but an official verification, using SHARCNET systems, was completed on May 28.

In order for a new prime number to become official, it has to be verified by a third party using different software on different computer architecture.

A prime number is a number that can only be divided by 1 and itself. Large prime numbers have applications in a wide-range of fields, including data security. Finding new prime numbers helps advance the field of cryptography and the development of encryption algorithms.

This new record-breaking number, expressed as 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1, has nearly 7.3 million decimal digits. The previous record was 6.3 million digits.

The new prime was independently verified by Tony Reix of Grenoble, France on an HP Itanium II 1.3 GHz system for five days and by Jeff Gilchrist, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, using eleven days of time on an HP Itanium II 1.5 GHz server at SHARCNET.

"I used SHARCNET systems because I needed a fast computer system in order to do the verification in a reasonable amount of time," confirms Gilchrist, also an IT security specialist at Ottawa's Elytra Enterprises Inc.

"On my home computer it would have taken a little less than a month to verify that the number was prime. Using the multi-CPU clusters at SHARCNET, I was able to verify the number in only 11 days. SHARCNET gives researchers access to computing power they would not normally be able to afford."

ORION provides SHARCNET with a dedicated, 1 Gb/s high-speed connection, via the ORION network, linking SHARCNET clusters at Western, Guelph and McMaster. Through ORION, SHARCNET researchers have the potential to use the combined power of all 3 sites to perform more innovative, computationally-intensive research.

Ground-breaking research currently being conducted at SHARCNET institutions includes modeling outbreaks of foot and mouth disease; investigating diseases such as SARS; investigating new materials for electronic devices; and developing new models to manage financial risk.

For more information on this discovery, contacts at Mersenne.org or Mersenne primes, please visit: http://www.mersenne.org/24036583.htm.