Technology

59366 readers

3626 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

426

New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)

submitted 3 weeks ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

120 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 3 weeks ago

There are infinite prime numbers. This has been known for thousands of years. You can find numerous proofs of this online, and go through them until one makes sense to you.

Also, quantum computers are on track to make division-based cryptography useless in the next decade or two. (Note that this only affects public key cryptography, and not shared key cryptography. So your online backups should be safe as long as you have a password for them.)