January 7, 2016 — GIMPS celebrated its 20th anniversary with the discovery of the  largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1.   Curtis Cooper, one of many thousands of GIMPS volunteers, used one of his university's computers to make the find.

While prime numbers are important for cryptography, this prime is too  large to currently be of practical value.  However, the search itself does have several practical benefits.  Historically,  searching for Mersenne primes has been used as a test for computer  hardware. Earlier this month, GIMPS' prime95 software and members of a German computing community uncovered a flaw in Intel's latest Skylake CPUs.  Prime95 has also discovered hardware problems in many individual's PCs.

To prove there were no errors in the prime discovery process, the prime was independently verified using both different programs and different hardware. Andreas Hoglund and David Stanfill each verified the prime using the CUDALucas  software running on NVidia Titan GPUs.  David Stanfill also verified using ClLucas on an AMD Fury GPU. Finally, Serge Batalov ran Ernst Mayer's MLucas software on a 18-core server to verify the prime.

Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri.  This is the fourth record prime for Dr. Cooper and his university. Their first  record prime was discovered in 2005, eclipsed by their second record in 2006. Dr. Cooper lost the record in 2008, but reclaimed it in 2013, and improved the record with this new prime. The primality proof took a month of computing on a PC with an Intel I7-4790 CPU.  Dr. Cooper and the  University of Central Missouri is the largest contributor of CPU time to the GIMPS project. The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award.

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