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

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      1 year ago

      It’s not just about primes, it’s about proving the technologies and techniques needed to verify such a number is prime, which might then be extrapolated to things unrelated to proving things prime.

      For example, GIMPS (the organisation behind this find) was a great example of distributed computing long before people had multiprocessor supercomputers in their homes.

      But let’s not forget the hobby factor. You don’t get to decide what other people do for fun. If they want to lend a portion of their computer’s runtime to a distributed computing project, that’s up to them.

      Some people climb tall mountains, and that’s not of much use to anyone either.