The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is an organization
of over 60,000 number theory enthusiasts, running over 211,000 computers,
doing over 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Teraflop) 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 eight 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 original goal of GIMPS was to test every Mersenne number with an exponent
less than 20,500,000. Currently, there are some exponents outside this bound
which are being tested for primality/factors as part of GIMPS.