NVIDIA COMPUTER FINDS LARGEST KNOWN PRIME, BLOWS PAST RECORD BY 16 MILLION DIGITS

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Luke Durant, a researcher, former Nvidia employee, and the most prolific contributor to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered a new largest known prime number. Short-handed as M136279841, the number can be calculated by multiplying two together 136,279,841 times and then subtracting one. GIMPS has discovered the last 18 Mersenne primes. Durant used a supercomputer comprising thousands of GPUs in 17 different countries to find the number.