Hacker Remix

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

28 points by fuglede_ 3 days ago | 10 comments

tromp 3 days ago

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/

mpreda 3 days ago

> 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

sega_sai 3 days ago

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.

fuglede_ 3 days ago

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

croemer 3 days ago

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

croemer 3 days ago

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.