A former Nvidia engineer has found the largest known prime number – a whopping 41 million digits long – using an A100 GPU made by his previous wor

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

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2024-11-05 13:00:02

A former Nvidia engineer has found the largest known prime number – a whopping 41 million digits long – using an A100 GPU made by his previous workplace to do the grunt work.

This wasn't the CPU-heavy hunt for primes that we've typically seen. No, this time GPUs, ones more widely used for the datacenter, did all of the heavy lifting, leveraging their high levels of parallel processing power to crack the calculations that CPUs just can't keep up with.

The latest addition, named M136279841, belongs to a special class of prime numbers that are especially large. Mersenne primes equal 2n - 1, where n is the exponent needed to generate the prime, used to form the name. M136279841, for example, equals 2136,279,841 - 1. (It's a bit snappier using the M moniker rather than the full prime number – but for those who fancy, the folks at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search have a ZIP archive containing all 41,024,320 digits.)

Part of the GIMPS search, which has been going since 1996, and which provides free software for would-be math sleuths, this discovery shows just how much muscle GPUs are bringing to high-performance computing and are useful far beyond just pushing pixels in games or running CAD simulations.