[ravanpao]

I am curious too. I wonder if this has anything to do with the public key encryption relying on prime numbers.

EFF has a bounty for large prime numbers: https://www.eff.org/awards/coop

"The EFF awards are about cooperation," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader for the awards. "Prime numbers are important in mathematics and encryption, but the real message is that many other problems can be solved by similar methods."

Finding these prime numbers will be no simple task, given today's computational power. It has taken mathematicians years to uncover and confirm new largest known primes. However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work together to share this massive resource. In the process, EFF hopes to inspire experts to apply collaborative computing to large problems, and thereby foster new technologies and opportunities for everyone.

[tinalumfoil]

> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something.

Considering how much more electricity a running computer uses versus an idle one and how much faster consumer CPUs degrade under load this definitely seems like a huge waste of resources for something that has little, if any, utility.

[organsnyder]

I used to run prime95 on all of my machines, back when power management (especially on desktops) was virtually nonexistent. Obviously, with the power management features we have now, an idle CPU (especially outside of a hosting environment) is not considered wasteful.