to nature home page web matters 7 December 2000

Figure 1: Performance of the Entropia network established for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which today operates at 1.3 teraflop/s. Over 120,000 PCs are networked to the project worldwide, of which around 30,000 operate at any one time.

The discovery of a two million-digit prime in 1999 was reported in a major mathematics journal, and also earned a $50,000 prize for the lucky owner of the PC that uncovered it.

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