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The quest to discover a new largest known prime has been on going for centuries. Those seeking to break the record for the largest known prime have pushed the bounds of computing. We have come a long way since 1978 when Landon's record breaking 6533-digit prime was discovered. Today’s largest known prime is almost 13 million digits long! To encourage the discovery of ever-larger primes, awards of $150000 and $250000 are offered to the first published proof of a discovery of a prime of at least 100 million and 1 billion digits respectively.
The search for the largest known prime requires writing and running code that must run to completion, without any errors. Because it takes a very long time to run to completion (several thousand hours in many cases), the code MUST RUN CORRECTLY the very first time! A significant QA effort is required to write 100% error-free code. Moreover considerable effort must be put into fault tolerant coding and recovery from the eventual operating system and hardware errors that will arise. The record goes neither to the fastest coder nor to the person with the fastest hardware but rather to the first result that is proven to be correct.
How are these large primes discovered? What are some of the best ways to find a new world record‐sized prime number? These and other prime questions will be explored. We will examine software and hardware based approaches and will look at code fragments and hardware machine state diagrams.
NOTE: Knowledge of advanced mathematics is NOT required for this talk
About the speaker
The first complete sentence Landon Curt Noll spoke (age 2) was “How far is the Sun?” Landon remains an Astronomer to this day where his study is focused on the inner solar system: the zone in which we ride our wonderful planet Earth, and that is bookended by the Sun and Jupiter. As Cisco's Resident astronomer Landon Curt Noll focuses on Balanced Technical Computing (BTC) by day, and focuses on our inner solar system as an Astronomer by night. Landon has made astronomical observations during total solar eclipses from every continent and from every ocean on Earth. He served as the expedition scientist for a team that searched for meteorites in the Antarctic ice and near the South Pole for a number of years.
Landon Curt Noll is the 'N' in the widely used FNV hash. He is also the founder of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. He was a member of the working group that developed the IEEE POSIX standard. He participated in the IEEE 1619 development of XTS and co-authored the XTS-AES Cryptologica paper on the security of Ciphertext Stealing. He serves as the Chair of the Co-operative Computing Award advisory panel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, advising them on awards for the discovery of astronomically large prime numbers.
As a mathematician, he developed or co-developed several high-speed computational methods and as held or co-held eight world records related to the discovery of large prime numbers. He is credited in Wikipedia as the co-inventor (with John Horton Conway) of a system for naming numbers of any size. Landon graduated from Linfield College with a BA in Math/Physics. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and is an associate of the American Astronomical Society.
Organised by: Miguel Angel Marquina - IT Department
CERN Computing Seminars and Colloquia