Largest Known Prime Number Discovered Using NVIDIA GPUs

A former NVIDIA engineer has identified a 41-million-digit prime, surpassing the previous record by 16 million digits.

Luke Durant, a former NVIDIA employee, discovered the new largest known prime number, M136279841, with over 41 million digits.
The discovery was made through the Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a project dedicated to finding large Mersenne primes.
Durant utilized a network of GPUs across 17 countries, initially identifying the prime with an NVIDIA A100 in Ireland and confirming it with an H100 in Texas.
This marks the first GIMPS prime found using a probable prime test, later validated by the Lucas-Lehmer primality test.
While large Mersenne primes currently have few practical applications, they hold potential for future cryptographic algorithms and demonstrate the capabilities of cloud supercomputing.