Former Nvidia software engineer Luke Durant and the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project have found the largest prime number known to man, requiring 41 million digits to write. GIMPS is an effort by volunteers around the world to discover Mersenne primes, which have the form 2n-1.
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The largest prime number currently known to man is 2136,279,841-1; and it is designated as M136279841. To get this number, you will need to multiply two by itself more than 136 million times, and subtract one from the resulting result. Before this, six years earlier, the number M82589933 that set the previous record was found.
The new discovery is significant because it was made using graphics processors in data centers. Mihai Preda was the first to use the resources of GPUs in 2017 – he “wrote the GpuOwl program to check Mersenne numbers for primality and made his software available to all GIMPS users.” In 2023, Luc Durand joined GIMPS, and the project participants built the infrastructure necessary to deploy the Preda program on several GPU servers in the cloud. The work took a year, but the efforts bore fruit on October 11, when the Nvidia A100 accelerator in Dublin, Ireland produced the result M136279841, and it was confirmed by the Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas.
It’s an interesting exercise for math buffs and a reminder that GPUs in the data center are useful for more than just artificial intelligence. They can be used for data-intensive simulations, cryptography, and more. GPUs are becoming more powerful and will continue to help us find even larger prime numbers.