] Using an international grid of about 240,000 networked ] computers, researchers have discovered the largest known ] prime number. ] ] The number, expressed as 2 to the 24,036,583th power ] minus 1, has 7,235,733 decimal digits. Discovered May 15, ] the number is nearly a million digits larger than the ] previous largest prime number, which was itself ] discovered last December. ... ] Of the 240,000 computers networked onto the grid, Woltman says ] 20,000 to 40,000 computers are active at any one time. The grid ] covers virtually every time zone in the world. ] ] Woltman estimates that the grid, which is comprised of businesses, ] universities and home users, does 20 trillion calculations a ] second. If the GIMP network were executing the Linpack benchmark at this rate, it would be number 2 on the Top 500 supercomputers list. |