Key Points
- Luke Durant, a former Nvidia employee, discovered the world’s largest known prime number.
- The prime number is 2^31,636,281 – 1, which has over 41 million digits.
- He used thousands of GPUs spread across 17 countries.
- GIMPS provided the software for finding Mersenne primes.
- This is the first Mersenne prime found using cloud computing.
Looma News
Earlier this month, Luke Durant, a former Nvidia employee from San Jose, California, hit a huge milestone in math by discovering the world’s largest known prime number, 2^31,636,281 – 1. He accomplished this with a network of thousands of graphics cards across datacenters in 17 countries, using free software from The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).
This prime number has more than 41 million digits and can be downloaded completely from GIMPS. Mersenne primes are special prime numbers that are one less than a power of 2. Finding a prime number means checking that it can’t be divided by smaller numbers, which gets trickier with larger numbers.
Durant’s discovery beat the previous record by over 16 million digits. The number was first spotted by an Nvidia A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland, which marked it as a possible candidate. After that, thorough checks were done across various hardware to confirm its status as a prime.
This finding is a big moment for GIMPS, being the first time cloud computing was used to find a Mersenne prime. Durant took on this project to show what GPUs can do beyond just artificial intelligence tasks. GIMPS noted that this achievement ends a 28-year stretch where regular personal computers mainly found large prime numbers.
