Former Nvidia Engineer Discovers 41-Million-Digit Prime (tomshardware.com) 11
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:2)
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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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
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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,