The new highest prime number.

The new number is two multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, minus 1. It has around 17,425,170 digits.Curtis Cooper, a computer science professor at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg discovered the new number which breaks his own record.
Can it be anywhere useful ?
The method used to find out these numbers are very complex. It requires a sophisticated network among various computers to carry out such a large and tedious search. This network infrastructure can be applied in other field sometime in the future.