this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)
submitted 1 week ago by gedaliyah to c/technology
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

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week 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] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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)