The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Research (GIMPS) is a project designed to find and publish ever larger Mersenne Prime Numbers. This can often act as a lagging indicator of the potential computing power available since it reflects the potential of current technology. The 42nd Mersenne Prime was discovered in February 2005 using a distributed computing system or, in this case, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 PC.
The number has 7,816,230 digits and is represented as 225964951-1. This was ten months after the 41st Mersenne Prime was number crunched and represents another step towards the $100,000 prize set by the Electric Frontirer Foundation for the first ten million digit prime.
Will it take ten months for the 43rd to be calculated?