this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
426 points (97.1% liked)

Technology

59312 readers
5184 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
426
New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
120 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't know if this is a common feature of large primes, but the digits in the exponent (136,279,841) themselves represent a prime number.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.

And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)