This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don't know why Nvidia is mentioned at all, except the hardware. That's cool that this person found the number, but Nvidia didn't do anything except employ them once upon a time and make a product that does a thing. It's not justified to celebrate the maker of a stove when a soup kitchen feeds everyone.
This is a win for Luke and GIMPS in general, and I'm happy for them.
This is the first such prime that was discovered using GPU cloud computing. It's not just an incredible new discovery, but also a demonstration of what this type of hardware network may be capable.
I didn't use to do this, but with the world being on fire I feel like I should ask whether the amount of energy put into finding huge primes is really worth it.
Why is anything worth the effort?
Cause research into primes makes computer security stronger. Cause research in general can make new discoveries that can lead to unexpected improvements in life.
Cause we need to know the answer to everything.
Cause it's better than mining crypto or doing AI training models over and over.
I wonder if he wrote some of the CUDA code or anything like that.
They mention nvidia because that’s the hardware used to find/prove.
I find it quite relevant to have the person/ group, the strategy or method, and the device used (including chipsets). Most articles on prime number discovery will mention all these things.
The fact that he worked there seems pretty irrelevant tho.
We define people by their labor value in capitalist societies. It only makes sense headlines would refer to people thru the lens of their previous employer.
Is it 3?
I bet it's 3.
My money's on 4.
Can I go with 6? I kinda like 6
No, but I bet it’s multiple of 6!
oh buddy, I ... I've got terrible news for you ...
Half-Life 2136279841-1 confirmed.
Almost certainly a multiple of 2 minus one
To save you a click: 2^136,279,841^-1
Formatting is off.
2^136,279,841 - 1
2 to the power of something, then subtract one to make it an odd number.
What Lemmy client are you using? Looks OK on the web and Jerboa.
Sync for Lemmy.
Here's the source of their comment.
Sync still uses Reddit's markdown rules, Lemmy is a little different.
Using Eternity and formatting was off for me. Second reply comment was good though
I’m using Voyager and yours doesn’t work, but the person you responded to looks fine. Weird!
Babe wake up, new prime number just dropped.
this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’
The first time since the 90's, before that all computer assisted Mercel primes found were found by super computers.
No first time ever. This isn’t a supercomputer, it’s a distributed cloud network that they’re referring to as a supercomputer because it has a lot of power. It’s not a supercomputer in any other sense of the word, as it’s set up on cloud providers around the globe rather than in one location in the same room.
I don't know if this is a common feature of large primes, but the digits in the exponent (136,279,841) themselves represent a prime number.
that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.
And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)
Me wondering why I haven't been able to deploy cloud instances with the A100 for an actual useful purpose for the past month
He must've been very anxious in order to count up to that...
