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Just to support what I'm talking about, SETI reports they are consuming 588Teraflops per second! Source: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/0/project/detail

I know it's not equal (I'm guessing roadrunner is more efficient in terms of flops/watt than the old computers that often are used for seti@home) but Roadrunner produces 1026 terraflops and uses 2.5 million watts.. So using that as a basis for comparison, seti@home is consuming 1,432,500 watts per second. Based on data provided by the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html ) which reports carbon output as 6.8956 x 10-4 metric tons CO2 / kWh, seti is producing 3,556 metric tons of CO2 per second!

The effort to eradicate malaria is also currently under way through distributed research platforms such BOINC. The Zeitgeist Movement (of up to a million 'followers' worldwide) invite you to pull up a virtual chair and contribute your idle CPU time: http://wiki.zmlingteam.org/w/BOINC Stats: http://boincstats.com/stats/team_stats.php?pr=mcp&co=&st=0&or=12 Malaria must go during the transition to a resource based economic model: (1) http://www.thevenusproject.com/en/the-venus-project/resource-based-economy (2) http://www.thezeitgeistmovementuk.com/resource-based-economic-model

Yeah. I've had LHC@Home on my specific BOINC project manager since 2004. It hasn't had much available work, though. Mostly I work on Einstein@Home (processes LIGO and other gravitational wave observatory data).

Yeah. I've had LHC@Home on my specific BOINC project manager since 2004. It hasn't had much available work, though. Mostly I work on Einstein@Home (processes LIGO and other gravitational wave observatory data).

Yeah. I've had LHC@Home on my specific BOINC project manager since 2004. It hasn't had much available work, though. Mostly I work on Einstein@Home (processes LIGO and other gravitational wave observatory data).

I don't know how WUs translate to points, but his stats are here.

SETI@home gets 495 teraFLOPS, according to this site: http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah
Sure, it's not one supercomputer, but it still does more calculations for one purpose than any other single supercomputer can.

While I can't see the actual article, if the summary is correct than most of the top 6 computers run faster than that. While it's an impressive feat for SETI, there are faster computers in a single unit now.

SETI@home gets 495 teraFLOPS, according to this site: http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah

Sure, it's not one supercomputer, but it still does more calculations for one purpose than any other single supercomputer can.

BOINC has progressed quite a bit since then. It now does provide a list of projects you can sign up for. The old "48 digit authenticator" nonsense is gone, and, in addition, there are account managers that enable you to manage multiple computers and which projects they run from a central location.

I installed it last night. Simply download the small script they link to here, chmod +x the script, and run it. It creates a directory and tells you which script to run. Run that script and tadaaa, the BOINC client starts. The only problem I had was my firefox install is not where the client expected it to be so it couldn't go to the finish registration page, but the helpful error message actually gave me the URL so I copied it to my browser and finished up that way. This is on FC4 BTW, with a Sempron 2500, so you don't need the latest cpu, and you can define the amount of cpu time the process gets using the preferences in the client.
BTW, I also run FaH, and have been since 2004 (I am inside the top 3.5% ranking). I didn't join either project to earn credits either, but I am not interested in seeing my stats, because there are many other multi-cpu machines dedicated by the *heros* out there that get all the high counts, and my contribution is off the bottom of the scale in comparison.
But it is still a contribution.
Also, you could always try this site if you really need to find out what you've accomplished. You need a minimum of 1 credit to use the system.

I figured out the cost for running distributed.net several years ago, and it was amazing. The difference between my computer sitting idle and my computer running the CPU at 100% is 60 watt-hours, or 1,440 extra watts per day. Scaling that number up to the amount of work I was able to perform in an hour, dividing out the amount of work that had to be done in order to crack one of the distributed.net challenge keys, turned into an ungodly amount of wasted power.

So how much has been donated to SETI@home? According to BOINC stats, 19,593,239,480 BOINC credits have been granted as of a few days ago. Since one credit represents the computations performed in 1/100th of a day on a reference machine, we can ballpark that 195,932,394 CPU days have been donated. As I said, my computer uses 1,440 watts per day under load, but let's assume it's only half as efficient as the average or reference machine; so that's about 720 watts per day. Times the credits, that's 141,071,323,680 watts (141 gigawatts.) According to the DoE, one pound of coal generates 926 watt-hours of electricity. So they've burned 152,344,842 pounds (76,000 tons) of coal, or 760 standard 100-ton cars -- that's almost seven 115-car trains of coal.

Put another way, that's 182,400 tons of CO2 that was pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of SETI. (Take that, Kyoto Protocol!) On the Chicago Climate Exchange, that'd cost you $364,000 in carbon credits. And that's just the BOINC figures, and not inclusive of the energy burned by SETI@home clients prior to the advent of BOINC.

Do you still wish to maintain that all the energy and waste and pollution is worth it, for a potential incidental invention? At least set your machine to folding@home, or the WCG, or some project that will produce results that might help the human race in tangible ways. You can still dream about E.T., just don't kill my planet looking for him.

According to the World Community Grid website:

World Community Grid is making [this] technology available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community.

WCG uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) client, an open source software project that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Headline should read Open Source Software Cures Cancer ;-)

BoincStats shows you who is contributing to World Community Grid projects. Check it out...and ask yourself why you aren't contributing.

Very interesting readings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seti%40home#Statistics
But in the field of distributed computing the Folding@home project is much speedier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40Home#Participation

The Seti@home is currently running at speed of 292.544 TeraFLOPS:
http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah
The Folding@home is currently running at speed of 1.153 PetaFLOPS:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

I know this isn't a fair comparison but the SETI@Home grid runs at 250 TeraFLOPS. Many of the other massive distributed computing projects run far into the Top 500 as well. reference

Individuals contributing their spare processor cycles via BOINC are currently producing over 380 TeraFLOPS putting them clearly in first place (if such distributed systems were counted).

SETI@Home is now operated exclusively through BOINC and it alone is doing over 167 TeraFLOPS right now, putting the SETI@Home network in second place, only behind BlueGene/L (if such distributed systems were counted).

You can contribute your spare processor cycles too by downloading the BOINC client and attaching to a cool project such as Rosetta@Home which folds proteins as part of an effort to cure human diseases. Join the biggest "supercomputer" today!

Individuals contributing their spare processor cycles via BOINC are currently producing over 380 TeraFLOPS putting them clearly in first place (if such distributed systems were counted).

SETI@Home is now operated exclusively through BOINC and it alone is doing over 167 TeraFLOPS right now, putting the SETI@Home network in second place, only behind BlueGene/L (if such distributed systems were counted).

You can contribute your spare processor cycles too by downloading the BOINC client and attaching to a cool project such as Rosetta@Home which folds proteins as part of an effort to cure human diseases. Join the biggest "supercomputer" today!

anyone have any idea how much it would cost me to buy the # one spot on boinc?
Take down NEZ for one day-- that would be sweet

http://www.boincstats.com/stats/boinc_user_stats.p hp?pr=bo&st=0&to=100

There are a number of things TFA doesn't tell you, or misleads you about.

1) The Climate Prediction experiment has been going on for several years now, first as a standalone application (like Seti@home), and now as both as a BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) application.

2) There are multiple BOINC [distributed computing] projects with greater than 10,000 users (see here, and here.) - thus even if the BBC meets it's goal of 10k users, it will still be far from the largest.

IF, and a big if, google released a linux distro, I wouldn't see it as an alternative to windows directly as much as an alternative to all the other already released linux distros. Indirectly it would be, at least in the initital stages. Later on it would be of course. There's a dozen or so top distros, then hundreds of smaller ones. And we also have macosx and solaris, both backed by big companies. None of them, or even collectively, have made it beyond 5% or so desktop market penetration compared to windows, even though they exist.

Linux accounts for around 9% of the total CPU cycles available to BOINC, other UNIX distro collectively about 3%.

They have

• Windows -- 89.5%
• Linux -- 7.8%
• Darwin -- 2.3%
• Other -- 0.4%

Now, this data is obviously skewed with respect to the total distribution, since the people who run something like SETI@home are probably more technologically inclined than the average computer user. This would mean that the percentage of non-Windows OSes is higher in this sample. On the other hand, the software for BOINC (SETI@home) is still somewhat Windows-centric, which would in turn increase the Windows share in the sample.

An interesting data point, nonetheless.

mmm. Warmed my lap.. and did a little bit. 0% idle.