The largest prime number known to man has recently been uncovered with the help of former Nvidia software engineer Luke Durant and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). GIMPS is a global effort to discover Mersenne primes — prime numbers that are formed by the formula 2^n-1 — and the group acknowledged Durant’s achievement on Mersenne.org.
According to its press release, the largest prime number known to man so far is (2^136,279,841)-1, which is also called M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). This means you could get this number by multiplying two by itself over 136 million times and then subtracting one from the final product. This is the largest prime number we’ve seen so far, with the last one, M82589933, being discovered six years prior.
What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that this is the first GIMPS discovery that used the power of data center GPUs. Mihai Preda was the first one to harness GPU muscle in 2017, says the GIMPS website, when he “wrote the GpuOwl program to test Mersenne numbers for primarilty, making his software available to all GIMPS users.” When Luke joined GIMPS in 2023, they built the infrastructure needed to deploy Preda’s software across several GPU servers available in the cloud.
While it took a year of testing, Luke’s efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test.
More than just being an interesting exercise for amateur and professional mathematicians, Durant’s discovery reminds us that the usefulness of data center GPUs goes beyond AI. They can be used for simulations that have a huge number of data points, cryptography, and more. Furthermore, as we expect the next generation of GPUs to have even more power, we might find the next largest prime number sooner rather than later.
