Former Nvidia engineer discovers 41-million-digit prime — largest prime number known to man was uncovered and verified with the help of GPUs
The largest prime number known to man has recently been uncovered with the help of former Nvidia software engineer Luke Durant and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). GIMPS is a global effort to discover Mersenne primes — prime numbers that are formed by the formula 2^n-1 — and the group acknowledged Durant’s achievement on Mersenne.org.
According to its press release, the largest prime number known to man so far is (2^136,279,841)-1, which is also called M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). This means you could get this number by multiplying two by itself over 136 million times and then subtracting one from the final product. 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.
