New Delhi: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has announced the discovery of the largest known prime number, 2136,279,841-1, derived by multiplying 13,62,79,841 twos and subtracting one, a number which has over 41 million digits. The number is easily represented as M136279841 and contains 16 million digits more than the previous record holder, M82589933, discovered in December 2018. For the past 28 years, the increasingly larger prime numbers have been discovered by everyday people running ordinary personal computers. A former Nvidia employee and researcher, Luke Durant began contributing to the GIMPS project in 2023, with the goal of demonstrating the benefits of GPUs by finding the largest prime number.
Durant architected a cloud supercomputer by running and maintaining the GIMPS software across multiple servers, with the system growing to span thousands of server GPUs across 24 data centres in 17 countries. The number was originally discovered on 11 October by an Nvidia A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland, and subsequently confirmed a day later by an Nvidia H100 GPU in San Antonio, Texas, using the Lucas-Lehmer test to verify prime numbers. The prime number was also independently verified using the Prime95 software on Intel CPUs. The prime number was then confirmed through multiple software based approaches. M82589933 is the 52nd known Mersenne Prime.
What are Mersenne Primes?
Mersenne Primes are named after the Marin Mersenne, a French Monk who found the first few Mersenne primes in the 17th century. A Mersenne prime fits a particular formula devised by Mersenne, which is two raised to a particular prime power minus one. The formula can additionally be used to calculate a perfect number, one that is a sum of all of its factors. The GIMPS software has been used to discover the last 18 Mersenne Primes. Aaron Blosser, one of the mathematicians working on the project was raided by the FBI in 1998 for hacking into the computers of a telephone company to run the GIMPS software.
