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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

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[+] [email protected] -15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Again, to what use?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

No idea, I'm neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they're used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it's a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Any cryptography you're likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren't relevant for practical cryptography, they're just fun.