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
I don’t know why Nvidia is mentioned at all, except the hardware. That’s cool that this person found the number, but Nvidia didn’t do anything except employ them once upon a time and make a product that does a thing. It’s not justified to celebrate the maker of a stove when a soup kitchen feeds everyone.
This is a win for Luke and GIMPS in general, and I’m happy for them.
We define people by their labor value in capitalist societies. It only makes sense headlines would refer to people thru the lens of their previous employer.
This is the first such prime that was discovered using GPU cloud computing. It’s not just an incredible new discovery, but also a demonstration of what this type of hardware network may be capable.
I wonder if he wrote some of the CUDA code or anything like that.