Largest Prime found - newspaper report

[vaughan]

I'm not sure where to post this as we don't have a Maths Announcements forum so I'm posting it here.

In today's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald January 7-8, 2006 page 24 in The Fallout section it is reported :

Maths grail found: US researchers have identified the largest known prime number. The team at Central Missouri State University found it last month after programming 700 computers nine years ago. Prime numbers are positive numbers divisible only by themselves and the number one, such as 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7. The number found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 - that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power, minus 1. "People ask why we do this" said Dr Steven Boone. "It's like going on a quest. We're looking for something incredibly rare."

I wonder why they don't use Distributed Computing in their search or if they do why the reporter failed to mention it?

/Edit: I found they participated in GIMPS.

http://www.cmsu.edu/x85370.xml

and

http://www.math-cs.cmsu.edu/~gimps/

/edit

[NeoGen]

Yea, the M43 (43rd mersenne prime discovered) was found by the GIMPS project not too long ago.
I saw the announcement in the mersenne forums.