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 power of x)-1, said that 2^136279841-1 has been confirmed as the largest known prime number — that is, a number that is only divisible by one and itself.

“At 41,024,320 digits, it eclipses by more than 16 million digits the previous largest known prime number found by GIMPS nearly 6 years ago,” per the release.

Nvidia is known for putting up huge numbers, and somehow this is no exception. 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, according to his LinkedIn.

“I was definitely fortunate to find one so quickly, despite putting such significant resources into the search,” Durant, who joined this group about one year ago, told Sherwood News.

“The technology improvements pioneered by the GIMPS community recently (Fermat PRP testing with proofs instead of Lucas-Lehmer testing with full double checks) definitely accelerated the discovery of this Mersenne prime and likely more down the line,” he added. “They are becoming increasingly difficult to find though, so I’m not sure they’ll increase in frequency.”

Hat tip to Dr. Christian Hubicki for alerting us of this discovery.