Grid power: Sysadmin discovers 13-million-digit prime number

Here is an interesting article from Computerworld. I will be the first to admit I am quite a geek, but I must say that I have no idea what I would do with a large prime number. Seems to me though that the sys admin in this article found a good way to utilize all of those underutilized PCs.

September 29, 2008 (Computerworld) A systems administrator -- not a mathematician -- used a grid of computers supplied by volunteers at the University of California, Los Angeles, to find the world's largest known prime number. The immense number is made up of nearly 13 million digits.
The discovery is part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a 12-year-old project that uses the computers of volunteers to find larger and larger prime numbers. The volunteer project has been focused on finding the first prime number with more than 10 million digits.
As a prize, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is handing out $100,000, with half going to the winner and half going to charity.
A prime number is a whole number that can be divided only by one and itself. Mersenne prime numbers are a class of primes named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who studied the rare numbers 300 years ago. Edson Smith, the systems administrator at UCLA who found the largest Mersenne prime, explained that primes and even Mersenne primes are easy to find in the lower numbers, like 3 and 5, but become much more difficult to find when the numbers become long and intricate.
The prime that Smith and his team at UCLA found was 12,978,189 digits long. It's such a large number that if you printed it out, it would run 30 miles long, according to Smith, who said he believes that if you tried to read it out loud, you couldn't finish it during your lifetime.
"It's really cool for everybody involved," Smith told Computerworld. "This is an excellent demonstration of the power of the grid."
Smith explained that the GIMPS project leaders hand out potential prime numbers to teams of volunteers, such as that at UCLA, whose computers run software designed to test the number.
The UCLA team used 75 Dell desktop computers running Microsoft Windows XP. Smith noted that if they had had only one computer running the program, the job would likely have taken longer than his lifetime.
"There are so few of this-large prime numbers," said smith. "They're very rare and can only be discovered through computing power. It's really about the power of the grid. In a certain sense, I'm a lottery winner. There are thousands [of people] looking with tens of thousands of computers and it just happened to be us."
This isn't the first prime number to be discovered at UCLA; it's the eighth, according to the university. In 1952, UCLA professor Raphael Robinson discovered five different Mersenne primes -- reportedly the first ones to be found using computers.
GIMPS founder George Woltman said in a press release that the organization next will offer up a $150,000 award for the first person or group to find the first 100-million-digit prime number.

Too much debt?

Generally speaking, I consider myself to be a fiscal conservative. Perhaps a more correct term would be fiscally responsible. It makes more sense to pay for things as you go. Of course there are certain exceptions, like using a mortgage (responsibly) to purchase a house. Likewise an economic depression or war sometimes may necessitate the government overextending itself.

That is what I expect of myself - and my government. Tax cuts are great, but if you give a tax cut, you need to reduce spending. The present administration assumed a budget that was running a significant surplus, yet even taking out the cost of the war (almost $600 billion at this point), the national debt has still increased by 60% in eight years - and that is prior to the impact of any debt incurred as a result of the apparent impending Wall Street bailout. The economics in play during the Bush administration did not justify unnecessary tax cuts which essentially decimated the hard earned fiscal positioning of the Clinton years.

I could write a lengthy post about the deficit, debt, etc. I could include numerous links from non-partisan sources, but I won't (well, maybe I can put up some links in a separate post). There are many theories that will argue one way or the other, whether the amount of debt we have is at an acceptable level, and so on. I think folks are able to do their own research if they care about the issues. Suffice to say, that for about 30 years (1950 - 1980) the total national debt remained fairly constant - around $2 trillion. It currently stands at over $9 Trillion without taking into account the impending bailout. The republican administrations since 1980 added roughly $6 Trillion.

How much is a trillion? In the U.S., a trillion is one, followed by twelve zeros. I did a little internet research and found a really great site buried in the NASA family of web sites that gave me a nice way to look at it. The analogy was constructed to help people understand how long a light year is. As you probably know, a light year is the distance light travels in one year or approximately six trillion miles. How can we comprehend such large numbers (thus the term astronomical numbers)? Without going through the details of the lengthy mathematical calculations, what it comes down to is that one trillion seconds is the equivalent of 31,546 years! In one could find a way to spend the current value of the debt at one dollar per second - over $31 million dollars a year - it would take nearly 300,000 years!

Seems to me we have too much debt! And this is just the tip of the iceberg!