GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^136279841 – 1 | Hacker News Reader

GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^136279841 – 1

mersenne.org

30 pointsfuglede_11 comments

Given the number of machines Luke Durant is running https://www.mersenne.org/report_recent_results/ it must cost a lot of money, given those are GPU nodes. I wonder what's the story there. Also I think up till yesterday the name was not shown on his submissions, it was only shown as ANONYMOUS.

He talks a bit more about it in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp4ilFOtoeg

The first Mersenne prime since 1996 not to be discovered on x86 hardware, but on an NVidia A100 [1].

[1] https://www.mersenne.org/primes/

> discovered [...] on an NVidia A100

Running an OpenCL (not CUDA) program [1], that runs just as well on AMD as on Nvidia GPUs.

[1] https://github.com/preda/gpuowl

Earlier Hacker News discussion, after the announcement that a (then secret) number was a probable prime, yet to be verified prime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858024

There are a lot more details available now worth discussing. This thread shouldn't be deprioritized as dupe, it isn't.

I wonder where Luke Durant got the money from to fund the effort. He's a former NVIDIA employee, I wouldn't be surprised if this was funded by NVIDIA.

Wonder why it took so long to find a new one. I get the time complexity is a bit more than O(p^2) by a Wikipedia search, but still, 6 years is a lot.

Bad luck, there just happens to be no prime number for a long time. The new prime exponent p is 136M, the old largest one was around 82M. So the overall effort to get from 82 to 136 was around 1.75 times the effort it took from 0 to 82 [calculated as (136/82)^2-1]. So it was more effort to find the 52nd than it was to find all 51 before. See here for the relatively unusual large gap: https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/

In some ways, it's right on schedule: https://twitter.com/deepakvenkatesh/status/18483562170366856...

Since the announcement a week ago I've started contributing to the project myself. It's fun!

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