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Tens of thousands of people volunteered the use of their PCs in a worldwide project that harnessed the power of 211,000 computers, in effect creating a supercomputer capable of performing 9 trillion calculations per second.
A prime number is a positive number evenly divisible only by itself and 1 [...] and so on. Mersenne primes are a special category, expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, where "p" also is a prime number.
More than 200,000 computers spent years looking for the largest known prime number. It turned up on Michigan State University graduate student Michael Shafer's off-the-shelf PC.
In the case of Shafer's discovery, it was 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1.
The number is 6,320,430 digits long. It would take 1,400 to 1,500 pages to write out. It is more than 2 million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number.
(from: http://www.sunspot.net/news/health/bal-te.primenumber11dec11,0,7198855.story?coll=bal-health-headlines)
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