Squirrels LLC Supercomputer Confirms 22-Million Digit Number
NORTH CANTON, Ohio – January 19, 2016 – Local software development company Squirrels LLC has verified the new largest prime number. The prime number consists of 22,338,618 digits and is five million digits larger than the previously discovered largest prime number.
Squirrels President David Stanfill said the number was calculated by multiplying together 74,207,281 twos and then subtracting one. The number is mathematically represented as 274,207,281-1. It contains more than seven million commas, and it would stretch for 68 miles if written out.
“This is the first Mersenne prime number found since 2013, and it’s one of only 49 found in more than 550 years,” Stanfill said.
The initial discovery took 31 days of non-stop computing by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search on a University of Central Missouri computer volunteered by University Professor Dr. Curtis Cooper.
Once discovered, Squirrels verified the number twice using different types of computer hardware and software from the original find. One verification took 2.3 days on an NVIDIA GPU and the other took 3.5 days using an AMD GPU. It would take today’s typical consumer laptop months to do the verification work done by Squirrels.
“The risk of an error in the initial discovery is around 2 in 100,” Stanfill said, “but the risk of a matching verification done on different hardware finding the exact same result erroneously is infinitesimally small.”
Stanfill said the discovery comes from an academic pursuit and is central to Squirrels’ goal in education to excite students and drive them toward interests in math and science.
“The technological improvements and software optimizations made in the search for this number will have benefits in many areas of life,” Stanfill continued. “We’ll see reverberations from this discovery in technology, health sciences, education and more.”
Squirrels plans to contribute to other high-profile research projects and not just continue research with prime numbers. Other projects may include protein folding analysis to help find cures for diseases, deep learning algorithms for rapidly identifying cancerous cells in medical images and extremely detailed physics and chemical simulations to identify potential improvements in battery and other technologies.
About the Supercomputer
The system at Squirrels uses high-end consumer equipment coupled with enterprise-grade server infrastructure. A custom liquid-cooling solution built by Squirrels allows unprecedented levels of power and space efficiency for the amount of computing power available. The system is capable of 480.9 TFLOPS and consumes only 24kW of power. That’s 2400 times faster than the average computer today. The system at Squirrels is unofficially ranked as the 182nd most powerful system in the world.
About Mersenne.org's Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was formed in January 1996 by George Woltman to discover new world record size Mersenne primes. In 1997 Scott Kurowski enabled GIMPS to automatically harness the power of hundreds of thousands of ordinary computers to search for these "needles in a haystack.” Most GIMPS members join the search for the thrill of possibly discovering a record-setting, rare and historic new Mersenne prime. The search for more Mersenne primes is already under way. There may be smaller undiscovered Mersenne primes, and there almost certainly are larger Mersenne primes to be found. Anyone with a reasonably powerful PC can join the hunt, and possibly earn a cash discovery award. The necessary software can be downloaded for free at www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm. GIMPS is organized as Mersenne Research, Inc., a 501(c)(3) science research charity. Additional information may be found at www.mersenne.org.
About Squirrels
Squirrels is a software-development company specializing in wireless audio and video transmission. Its industry-leading products include AirParrot 2, Reflector 2 and Reflector Director. More information about these products and Squirrels can be found at https://airsquirrels.com.
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Sidney Keith
Squirrels LLC
press@airsquirrels.com
O: 855-207-0927 ext. 7001