The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is an organization of over 15,000 number theory enthusiasts, running 26,000 computers, doing over 958,000,000,000 calculations/second, that seeks to utilize the power and idle CPU time of thousands of small computers to find large Mersenne primes.

George Woltman, a retired Orlando computer programmer, wrote the software and established GIMPS more than three years ago.

Scott Kurowski, a San Jose software development manager provided the networking tools to automate the GIMPS system using Entropia's PrimeNet server. The PrimeNet server distributes Mersenne numbers and collects results via the Internet to and from thousands of computers running copies of George's program.

The goal of GIMPS is to test every Mersenne number with an exponent less than 20,500,000.