this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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434
New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's not a presumption when there is no basis for it all. It's a fucking fact.

If there was a segment of society that said "Hey, we really want to do this thing, but we really just need the highest prime number possible! Why won't anyone find that for us?" Then I'd say OK.

You've got a guy out to beat a record and get his name on the books here. Useless.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That segment exists. That's literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Again, to what use?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

No idea, I'm neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they're used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it's a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Any cryptography you're likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren't relevant for practical cryptography, they're just fun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Well allow me to retort:

There isn't a CPU on this planet that will digest this number in any meaningful way out to this decimal. Not as a whole at least.

That's why this was clearly computed on a GPU. They're good at that.

We also have news of the first stages of prime numbers being cracked on Quantum Computers with amazing efficiency. So whatever this number is will be useless soon.