Cloud Computing: Filling the gaps – Microsoft contest locates new prime numbers
April 1, 2014
Grazed from CNet. Author: Stephen Shankland.
Prime numbers are endlessly fascinating to computing and math fans, and there’s an infinite supply of them. A Microsoft contest succeeds in fleshing out the list of primes that aren’t actually the largest. A contest to promote technical education and Microsoft’s cloud-computing infrastructure has turned up a previously unknown prime number more than 342,000 digits long — and a bunch of other smaller ones.
The Microsoft Prime Challenge contest winner, a US resident who goes by the username PHunterLau, also turned up at least four other primes in the contest. The object of the competition was not to find the largest prime ever, but instead to find primes within the wide swaths of unexplored territory that current prime-number search techniques don’t scrutinize…
To perform their prime search, contestants got $200 worth of time on Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud-computing infrastructure that competes with Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Public Cloud, and more…
Read more from the source @ http://www.cnet.com/news/filling-the-gaps-microsoft-contest-locates-new-prime-numbers/