We just found the world’s new largest prime number. It is so difficult that it took us six years to achieve it.

2^136,279,841-1. That number probably doesn’t tell you anything in itself, but it is an important number. And that’s because it is the largest prime number in the world, and it is very difficult to find. So much so that it took us six years to do it: its predecessor was found in 2018.

gimpsThe Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) collaborative project is a distributed computing initiative that attempts to find Mersenne prime numbers (2^n-1 format). It does this by harnessing the combined power of thousands of “volunteer” computers around the world that are dedicated to performing intensive calculations to find those new primes. That is, numbers that can be divided only by themselves and one (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, …).

eurekaThe person responsible for this discovery, also known as M136279841, has been a very active user of the GIMPS project, named Luke Durant, a former employee of NVIDIA. He achieved this by combining the power of GPUs in the cloud, which he was able to utilize much less because he used them when those components were underutilized. What they ultimately created was a kind of “distributed supercomputer” with GPUs located in data centers in 17 different countries.

From CPU to GPUUntil a few years ago, the search for Mersenne prime numbers focused on use of main processors with Prime95 applications. However, Mihai Preda, another member of the initiative, created a tool called GpuOwL that used GPUs instead of CPUs for these calculations. The power of these components is much higher than that of general-purpose processors, which allows calculations to be performed significantly faster. The tool was later improved by George Waltman and Aaron Blosser to improve its performance on servers. In the end, all four of them were credited with finding the world’s new largest cousin.

We only have 52 cousins ​​from MersenneOne could imagine that so far the combined power of those computers and GPUs would have allowed us to find lots of new primes, but in reality it has only allowed us to find 52 new Mersenne primes. These prime numbers are so large that they are particularly difficult to find and consume a lot of computing resources. Of course: the GIMPS project has become the absolute protagonist in terms of the discovery of new cousins: this effort has been responsible for the discovery of the last 18.

You can also find Mersenne’s cousinThe GIMPS initiative is completely open to new volunteers who leave computing capacity on their computers when not in use. Simply download and install a small program that will run when it detects that our computer is idle.

And give a (symbolic) reward if you doThose who find a new Mersenne prime number receive a reward, although it is not very large. Specifically, $3,000. Of course: The prize will be big, $50,000, for whoever finds the first prime number with at least 100 million decimal digits.

prime numbers haveThis endeavor seems more like a curiosity than anything else, but as long ago reported in Ars Technica, these large prime numbers have practical applications. For example, they are part of RSA encryption: someone who wants to receive a message protected by this algorithm will publish the product of two large prime numbers as their “public key”, making it very difficult to brute force decryption. .

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In Xataka Both of these problems have troubled mathematicians for decades. A genius has solved them with a stroke of the pen