Entropia Grid Powers Mersenne Project's Discovery of Largest Known Prime Number; Discovery Would Have Required 13,000 Years Running On One PC.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 11, 2001

Entropia, Inc., the leading provider of PC-based distributed computing technology, and Mersenne.org announced today that Michael Cameron, a 20 year-old participant in the worldwide mathematics research project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered the largest known prime number using his PC connected to the Entropia Mersenne Grid. Entropia and Mersenne.org run GIMPS jointly. Entropia created the distributed computing technology and maintains the global Grid that harnesses spare CPU cycles to accelerate the discovery of these rare numbers. Mersenne.org developed the application software that runs on this Grid and performs the calculations to discover these prime numbers. GIMPS has 130,000 volunteer participants with more than 210,000 PCs.

The new Mersenne prime, expressed as 2 to the 13,466,917th power minus 1, contains 4,053,946 digits and was discovered November 14th. It belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called Mersenne primes. The discovery marks only the 39th known Mersenne prime, named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who first studied the numbers. Mersenne primes are most relevant to number theory and have practical implications for encryption and computational benchmarking. GIMPS started running on the Entropia Grid in 1997, making it one of the first Internet Grid projects available for public participation.

Ernst Mayer, Paul Victor Novarese, and Guillermo Ballester Valor each independently verified the new number using server hardware and number crunching software combinations each different from the other. The discovery is the fifth record prime found by the GIMPS project, and the third discovered using Entropia's Grid for distributed computing. Previous Mersenne primes discovered by GIMPS participants have been recognized as the world's largest in The Guinness Book of World Records. In recognition of every GIMPS contributor's effort and Entropia's PrimeNet Grid, credit for this new discovery will go to "Cameron, Woltman, Kurowski, et. al."

"A friend informed me that if I was going to leave my computer on all the time I should make use of that wasted CPU time. I put GIMPS on my PC because it does not interfere with my work on the computer. Finding the new prime was a wonderful surprise," said Michael Cameron, who used an 800 MHz AMD T-Bird PC running part-time to find the number prime.

"Finding this prime is by far our most impressive accomplishment to date, having taken two years of non-stop work. In addition to congratulating Michael Cameron, we wish to thank all 130,000 volunteer home users, students, schools, universities and businesses from around the world that participate in GIMPS," said GIMPS founder George Woltman. "Joining GIMPS is a great way to learn about math through participation -- plus you might find a new Mersenne prime, like Michael has."

"Congratulations to Michael and GIMPS," said John Wark, CEO at Entropia. "We are excited about the repeated success of GIMPS on the Entropia Grid and the positive impact that has on volunteers participating in the project. GIMPS continues to demonstrate Entropia's distributed computing scalability and power with a demanding parameter search application."

The number crunching power and searching performed by GIMPS is similar to that used by the pharmaceutical, chemical, materials science and financial software applications that Entropia accelerates for its customers. Historically, the discovery of large prime numbers has required supercomputers. Entropia's Grid performs 2 teraflops (a million million million calculations per second), around the clock while the participants use their PCs for all the things they normally do.

About The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) was formed in January 1996 by George Woltman to discover new world-record-size Mersenne primes. GIMPS harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of PCs to search for these "needles in a haystack". Scott Kurowski, a software development manager and entrepreneur in San Diego, California, founded Entropia in 1997 by developing the PrimeNet system for GIMPS to demonstrate Entropia's distributed computing technology. Most GIMPS members join the search for the thrill of possibly discovering a record setting, rare, and historic new Mersenne prime. The search for more Mersenne primes is already under way. There may be smaller, as yet undiscovered Mersenne primes, and there are certainly larger Mersenne primes waiting to be discovered. Anyone with a reasonably powerful personal computer can join GIMPS and become a big prime hunter. All the necessary software can be downloaded for free at http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm. GIMPS is based in Orlando, Florida.

About Entropia, Inc.

Entropia's enterprise distributed computing technology harnesses the vast untapped processing power of PCs on corporate networks to perform that enterprise's computationally intensive work. Entropia's highly scalable technology delivers computing capacities on par with that of clusters and supercomputers at a fraction of the cost. Companies deploy Entropia's solution to reduce their time to market by leveraging the latent computing power in PCs they already own, dramatically increasing the return on investment in their desktop computing and network assets. Commercial applications include critical pharmaceutical, chemical and materials research, and financial services. Entropia powers mathematics research (www.mersenne.org), AIDS drug research (www.FightAIDSatHome.org), and economic research (www.SaferMarkets.org). Founded in 1997, the company is headquartered in San Diego, California. For more information visit the Entropia Web site at www.entropia.com.