10000 pc's?

Brute force succeeds in the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) Challenge -
Oxygen3 24h-365d, by Panda Software (http://www.pandasoftware.com)

Madrid, November 8 2002 - After nearly two years of trying, a group of
academics has successfully solved the Certicom ECCp-109 Challenge, which
involved decrypting a message encrypted with an implementation of the 109
bit Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem key.

According to Certicom Corporation -at
http://www.certicom.com/about/pr/02/...cc_winner.html -, the challenge
was solved utilizing a massive amount of computing power including 10,000
computers (mostly PCs) running 24 hours a day for 549 days. In obtaining the
encryption key, no flaws were reported in the implementation of the
algorithm. The key was in fact decrypted using brute force (i.e., trying one
key after another until reaching the correct one).

The prize put up for successfully taking on the ECC 109 Challenge was 10,000
dollars, of which the team are to donate 8,000 dollars to the Free Software
Foundation. Certicom are now offering 20,000 dollars for the ECC 131
Challenge will is estimated to require several thousand times more computing
power than the ECCp-109 Challenge.


So maybe 100,000 pc's?..wonder where they get them all