June 15, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Louis Helm
         Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
         Email: lhelm@seventeenorbust.com

Champaign, Ill. -- The ``Seventeen or Bust'' distributed computing project
today announced the discovery of a massive prime number. The new prime is 2.7
million digits long and stands as the largest non-Mersenne prime ever
discovered. It is the fifth largest-known prime overall; the record holders
have historically been Mersenne primes, which have special properties that make
them far easier for a computer to detect.

The project, which utilizes the spare power of thousands of personal computers,
is attempting to solve a 50-year-old math challenge known as the Sierpinski
Problem. The project relies on volunteers who install special software on their
PCs. The software crunches numbers for the project when the computer is idle
and coordinates with a central server over the Internet.

Derek Gordon, a system integrator in Jessup, Md., was one of the first users to
download the project's software when it went public in 2002. His workstation,
an Intel Pentium 4 computer running Microsoft Windows XP, discovered the prime
and reported it to the central server in the early morning hours of June 8.
Gordon's employer, Leading Edge Design & Systems, had granted him permission to
run the software on six company-owned computers.

In addition to the thousands of users worldwide who donate their computers'
spare time, several other organizations have contributed to Seventeen or Bust's
success. George Woltman, the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime
Search, or ``GIMPS,'' provided the fast number-crunching code used to search
for primes. Earlier this year, Woltman's project announced its discovery of a
record-breaking prime number and received national media attention. Seventeen
or Bust's central server and website are hosted by Voxel Dot Net Inc., a
major provider of managed hosting services.

Seventeen or Bust was founded as a personal project by three software engineers
hailing from St. Joseph, Mich. Since its April 2002 inception, Seventeen or
Bust has uncovered eight massive primes and will need to find nine more in
order to solve the Sierpinski problem.

The project's website is available at http://www.seventeenorbust.com/.

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