Question

New open-source ECPP software and world record

Answer 1

I know I will be downvoted to hell, but...

This program is cool, the implementation is surely very clever, and the theoretical algorithm behind is very very interestig. And I really like integers, primes, and number theory.

However, I find all these "records" a puerile waste of resources.

From the presentation page:

*The first phase of the record, [...] has taken
about 26 days of wallclock time and 67 years of CPU time, in several runs on clusters with 752 to 1328 cores.*

What's the point of wasting 67 years of CPU time to prove the utterly useless fact that 10^50000 + 65859 is prime?

I get that one is proud of their code and want to show that (1) it works (2) it is faster than previous approaches. But I imagine this can be done on much small instances. Let's fix a benchmark.

To me this sounds like "they gave us this supercomputer for one month and the most interesting thing we did was to prove that a certain more-or-less-random number is prime."

Answer 2

Considering that these programs have no practical or theoretical application (for what I know, nobody really needs to certificate that a very large number is prime. I would be only too pleased to stand corrected), besides being a interesting and very clever implementations of number theoretical algorithms, I find very strange Primo is not released as source.

Answer 3

I was just wondering what the biggest prime was.

Answer 4

this is cool! btw what does it mean to "test a primality of a number"

Answer 5

A number either is prime or isn’t. This software checks which one it is.