People: Over 1300 people sent in results (This number is an approximation since some registered several times whereas others participated without registering)
Machines: 9500 machines sent in at least one result. (This is again an approximation since some people gave a single name covering several machines whereas others gave varying names for a single machine). At any given time, about 5000 were actively sending in results.
Time: we started at the beginning of December and took just over four months.
Amount of computation: the calculation would have taken about 200000 days on a 450 MHz PC with MMX, i.e. more than 500 years. For comparison, cracking a 56-bit DES key by exhaustive search would take about 110000 days. On a 500 MHz Alpha 21164, the times would be about two thirds (for ECDL) and one half (for DES) respectively.
Elliptic-curve operations: altogether we did about 2.8 × 10^15 elliptic-curve operations of which 2.3 × 10^15 led to distinguished points recorded at INRIA. We collected 2.05 million distinguished points in 1.3 Gigabytes of email.
Machine speeds: the fastest were...
| Operations per second | CPU | Clock speed | Program version | O.S. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 454 k | Alpha 21264 | 750 MHz | 64 bit | Linux |
| 416 k | Alpha 21264 | 667 MHz | 64 bit | Tru64 Unix |
| 355 k | PowerPC G4 | 450 MHz | Altivec | MacOS |
| 349 k | Athlon | 1 GHz | MMX | Win98 |
Machine and OS type: the points sent in split up into three thirds...
The remaining 2% was on MacOS, OS/2, BeOS etc.
Solution: The people who found the matching points that finally enabled us to calculate the solution were: Asa Reed with Colorado Group and a person who prefers to remain anonymous (and who is donating his $1000 to the Apache Software Foundation).
The points were well distributed among the teams, with no single team dominating. Top 10 teams:
| % | Team | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 12.5 | INRIA | Mostly INRIA people, also using lots of École polytechnique machines |
| 12.3 | Death Star Rising | AT&T, Swinburne Astrophysics and others |
| 7.0 | CLX | Linux group from the north of France |
| 6.6 | FoRK | Friends of Rohit Khare mailing list, plus a contingent from Red Hat |
| 5.8 | Pingouins Bretons | Linux group from the west of France including IRISA |
| 4.9 | Entrust Cabalist Alliance | Entrust Technologies + the "cabalists" who factored RSA-155 |
| 4.9 | No Team Yet | Over 200 people who didn't pick any team! |
| 2.6 | University of Kentucky | Like the name says |
| 2.3 | TU+CMS Wien | Technical University of Vienna, Austria |
| 2.2 | URZ Uni Ulm | University of Ulm in Germany |
Likewise with participants. The top 10 participants were:
| % | Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Paul Bourke | Swinburne Astrophysics & Supercomputing, Australia |
| 3.7 | Rajit Manohar | Cornell Computer Systems Laboratory |
| 3.2 | Bruno Verlyck | INRIA |
| 2.5 | Philippe Deschamp | INRIA |
| 2.4 | Vincent Goffin | AT&T |
| 2.2 | Bernd Leibing | University of Ulm, Germany |
| 2.1 | Mark A. Brown | Rhythm and Hues Studios, L.A. |
| 1.5 | Dan Schwartz | Lehigh University, Pennsylvania |
| 1.5 | Patrick Ménager | EUDIL, Lille, France |
| 1.3 | David Mentré | IRISA, Rennes, France |