[ Robert Harley
writes: ]
The largest public calculation ever to use a complex parallel
algorithm is underway. Developed by Robert Harley of INRIA
(France), the project has already caught the imagination of about
130 participants and is distributed on over 500 machines.
Canadian company Certicom is offering a prize of $5000 for the
solution. If won, $4000 will be donated to the Free Software
Foundation and the rest split between participants who find parts
of the solution.
Source code is available under the GNU Public License. The
program uses CPU time but almost no other resources. Communication
is done by email to a central site. Note that this is NOT a
trivially parallel exhaustive search.
For information on how to participate, see the readMe.
For further details on what the project is about, see the FAQ.