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

submitted 3 weeks ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] sus@programming.dev 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)