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

  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.brEnglish
    401·
    2 个月前

    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.

    • tyler@programming.devEnglish
      251·
      2 个月前

      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.

      • fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 个月前

        Legit question: how is that different conceptually to the random individuals all running Prime95? Could that not also be referred to as a cloud supercomputer?