New prime just dropped. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a group of volunteers who search for prime numbers that are (2 to the...

According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      252·
      9 个月前

      Yes. The amount of effort and resources used to do this shouldn’t just be a fucking waste.

      This is a fucking waste. Proper fucking waste.

      Nobody will use this math in our lifetime. Probably not the next generation either. We’re incapable of using it in any meaningful way except bragging rights.

        • wagesj45@fedia.io
          15·
          9 个月前

          Even if it’s true, he’s just admitting that he doesn’t care about future generations. Fuck them kids, I guess.

        • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
          136·
          9 个月前

          It’s not a presumption when there is no basis for it all. It’s a fucking fact.

          If there was a segment of society that said “Hey, we really want to do this thing, but we really just need the highest prime number possible! Why won’t anyone find that for us?” Then I’d say OK.

          You’ve got a guy out to beat a record and get his name on the books here. Useless.

          • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
            17·
            9 个月前

            That segment exists. That’s literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.

              • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
                131·
                9 个月前

                No idea, I’m neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they’re used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it’s a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.

                • AlotOfReading@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  41·
                  9 个月前

                  Any cryptography you’re likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren’t relevant for practical cryptography, they’re just fun.

                • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  116·
                  9 个月前

                  Well allow me to retort:

                  There isn’t a CPU on this planet that will digest this number in any meaningful way out to this decimal. Not as a whole at least.

                  That’s why this was clearly computed on a GPU. They’re good at that.

                  We also have news of the first stages of prime numbers being cracked on Quantum Computers with amazing efficiency. So whatever this number is will be useless soon.