Luke Durant, who used to work for NVIDIA, has achieved a remarkable feat with his discovery of the world’s largest prime number. He harnessed the power of thousands of graphics processors (GPUs) for the discovery that made waves in both the math and technology worlds. The resulting prime number has the formula 2^136,279,841 – 1 and consists of approximately 41 million digits. Here is the world’s largest prime number…

Discovery of the world’s largest prime number using thousands of GPUs

First of all, Durant used a platform called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) and its free software for this discovery. GIMPS has been working for years to discover a special type of prime numbers called Mersenne primes.

For those of you who are curious about Mersenne primes, they are defined as numbers that are one less than a power of 2, and such primes are much rarer than other primes. As such, they are considered both difficult to discover and quite special.

Durant’s discovery of the world’s largest prime number was made with thousands of GPUs in 24 data center sites in 17 countries. In particular, the NVIDIA A100 GPU played a major role. But in order to validate this gigantic number, various prime tests had to be performed on other platforms after the discovery. The verification process was quite complex and required advanced mathematical calculations.

After all the tests, the results were confirmed and Durant was able to present the reality of the gigantic prime number to the mathematical world. Meanwhile, the discovery is also a first in the history of the GIMPS platform. Durant is the first person to discover a Mersenne prime number on GIMPS using cloud computing infrastructure.

It is worth noting that Durant stated that he started this discovery at the beginning of the project to demonstrate the power of graphics cards in scientific research. It might be hard to visualize such a long number; for those who are curious, it is available for download on the GIMPS website. What do you think about this discovery? Let us know in the comments below.