Former Nvidia Engineer Discovers 41-Million-Digit Prime (tomshardware.com) 29
Former Nvidia engineer Luke Durant, working with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), recently discovered the largest known prime number: (2^136,279,841)-1 or M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). The achievement was detailed on Mersenne.org. Tom's Hardware reports: This is the largest prime number we've seen so far, with the last one, M82589933, being discovered six years prior. What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that this is the first GIMPS discovery that used the power of data center GPUs. Mihai Preda was the first one to harness GPU muscle in 2017, says the GIMPS website, when he "wrote the GpuOwl program to test Mersenne numbers for primarilty, making his software available to all GIMPS users." When Luke joined GIMPS in 2023, they built the infrastructure needed to deploy Preda's software across several GPU servers available in the cloud.
While it took a year of testing, Luke's efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test.
While it took a year of testing, Luke's efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test.
Prime Dup (Score:5, Informative)
How many homes could be powerd by this? (Score:2)
Would like these distributed computing programs to compute the electricity cost and kilowatt hours used for this research.
Question to math folks (Score:2)
Is this hunt for ever larger primes just a fun math hobby or is there some mathematical, engineering, or other real world value to finding each next bigger prime?
Serious question, not my field.
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I hope it has some real world value, otherwise this is a massive waste of resources on "fun", that could have been on used on something actually worthwhile.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Finding new Mersenne primes is unlikely to shed any light on the Riemann hypothesis.
The RH predicts some statistical properties of prime numbers, but the Mersenne primes are so sparse and so far beyond the range of other known primes that they can't be analyzed statistically.
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By more worthwhile, do you mean surveilling people or serving popups?
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I hope it has some real world value
Understanding the distribution of primes is important for cryptography and number theory.
But this is mostly just recreational mathematics.
otherwise this is a massive waste of resources on "fun"
"Massive" compared to what?
If you want to ban fun activities, there are way better places to start.
could have been on used on something actually worthwhile.
Who gets to decide what is "worthwhile"?
Should we have a bureau of funness to decide how people can spend their own money?
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Re: Question to math folks (Score:1)
What if Nvidia donated computer time?
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Who gets to decide what is "worthwhile"?
Is there a chance it will lead to any new ideas? Or is it just as useless as calculating a few trillion more digits of pi? I checked, and there is still no pattern.
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I was not asking about practical application, as those cannot always be seen ahead. I'm asking if it has any mathematical value.
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Re:Question to math folks (Score:5, Interesting)
One rationale that has been given is that it's a kind of "stress test" for computers and the algorithms that they run. There are algorithms for discovering Mersenne primes, and then there are different algorithms for testing primality. And if they agree, that speaks to the reliability of the computation from both a hardware and software perspective.
With respect to mathematical discovery, in some cases, there have been advancements in certain areas of math that occurred in part because of insights revealed by intensive computation. This is slightly different than "proof by computer." For example, calculating nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann zeta function, or large twin primes, might give some empirical evidence of the asymptotic density of these, which in turn could motivate mathematicians to prove more strict bounds. But we have to be wary of such "evidence," because there are counterexamples where patterns change once we start looking at sufficiently large cases.
There is a long history, dating back to antiquity, of people who were the first to discover or compute large primes or decimal digits of pi. To be the first means your name goes down in mathematical history. Therefore, such a search has motivated people to devise increasingly more efficient algorithms and prove the theorems they are based upon, and this is also another way in which such a search fuels discovery, albeit indirectly.
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Sarcasm notwithstanding, your comment indicates either ignorance, or deliberate misinterpretation.
Moreover, I myself would not consider the first claim to be particularly relevant in this day and age. I only cited it (and explicitly said as much) because it is historically relevant. At one time, computers were not generally assumed to be infallible in their implementation. Difficult computations that employed disparate algorithms were useful.
And perhaps you don't remember the Pentium bug: https://en.wik [wikipedia.org]
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Prime numbers help secure cryptography. The larger the number, the more difficult to factor and therefore more secure. Especially with Quantum Computing potentially/theoretically speeding up the time to crack.
https://developerport.medium.c... [medium.com]
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Even small Mersenne primes are of no practical use in the standard cryptographic algorithms.
And numbers this ginormous would be ridiculous to try to do routine computations with,
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Primality tests make use of large number multiplication algorithms, so they make an interesting testing ground for them. For multiplying large integers, there are more efficient algorithms than the one we learned at elementary school, and they often make use of Fourier transforms (via the convolution theorem).
I've personally learned a bit of Python networking stuff as I wrote Primetools, which has been used to connect GPU workers to GIMPS servers. It's now being obsoleted by forks with improved features,
Re: Question to math folks (Score:1)
Re:F#CK! (Score:1)
I wrote a song about 4,000 holes, but then some nutjob shot me in NY while walking outside with my Asian wife. So, don't.
Duke of Lrrr-l (Score:3)
Mersenne Prime -
I think he is brother-in-law by royal marriage of Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8.
Getting serious, I found this link mapping dates of discovery:
https://www.mersenne.org/prime... [mersenne.org]
Take a vote - what comes first - a man on Mars or the next Mersenne prime?
Put that in your quantum calculator.
and still can't get a date. (Score:1)
now gotta find some prime porn.