Scott Kurowski wrote the back end PrimeNet server to demonstrate volunteer computing software by Entropia, a company he founded in 1997.

GIMPS is registered as Mersenne Research, Inc. with Kurowski as Executive Vice President and board director.

[10]) In September 2020,[11][12][13] GIMPS began to support primality proofs based on verifiable delay functions.

These proofs, together with an error-checking algorithm devised by Robert Gerbicz, provide a complete confidence in the correctness of the test result and eliminate the need for double checks.

[19][20] The name for the project was coined by Luke Welsh, one of its earlier searchers and the co-discoverer of the 29th Mersenne prime.

As of July 2022[update], GIMPS has a sustained average aggregate throughput of approximately 4.71 PetaFLOPS (or PFLOPS).

[29] Specifically, if the software is used to discover a prime number with at least 100,000,000 decimal digits, the user will only win $50,000 of the $150,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Whenever a possible prime is reported to the server, it is verified first (by one or more independent tests on different machines) before being announced.

The importance of this was illustrated in 2003, when a false positive was reported to the server as being a Mersenne prime but verification failed.