This post was published 6 years 4 months 23 days ago. Therefore, it may well be out of date. Do not reply on the contents of this post being accurate. The largest known prime number, a 9.1 million-digit figure, has been found using a grid of computers by researchers at Central Missouri State University. It took all 70,000 computers 10 months to make this find. I read the story at Internetnews.com and a couple of lines in the article are particularly interesting.
Working alone, it would take a brand new Pentium 4 computer about 4,500 years to find this number
If you typed one number on a keyboard every second, it would take you 106 days to type out the whole number
This one number would have enough digits to fill up close to three Bibles
It clearly shows the power of true grid computing.