Former NVIDIA engineer uses A100 GPU to discover world's largest prime number

Most gamers only really care about how many frames per second their graphics card can push at what graphical settings, but what GPUs and the impressive number-crunching technology insider is capable of much more than just hitting maximum frame rates in games.

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Perhaps a more unusual example of the power of a GPU comes from a former NVIDIA engineer who has decided to use a NVIDIA A100 GPU to discover what is now considered to be the largest prime number. According to a new report from The Register, the new prime number has been named "M136279841," and it's equal to the monstrous number that is 2 to the power of 136,279,841 - 1. For those interested, the Great Internet Mesrsenne Prime (GIMPS) Search has a ZIP file containing a text file that has every single one of the 41,024,320 digits.

The download size of the file, or the largest prime number ever discovered, is just shy of 20MB at 18.3MB, which is substantially large for a text file. Former NVIDIA engineer Luke Durant has spotted what is called the 52nd Mersenne prime, which is a prime number that equals 2n - 1. According to the report, the last time a Mersenne prime was discovered was by Patrick Laroche more than five years ago, who found it by running the free GIMPS software on a four-core Intel Core i5-4590T processor over 12 days.

The discovery of what is now considered the largest known prime number stands as a example of the incredible computer power of modern day GPUs.