Einstein@Home Set To Break Petaflops Barrier

hazeii writes "Einstein@home, the distributed computing project searching for the gravitational waves predicted to exist by Albert Einstein, looks set to breach the 1 Petaflops barrier around midnight UTC tonight. Put into context, if it was in the Top500 Supercomputers list, it would be in at number 24. I'm sure there are plenty of Slashdot readers who can contribute enough CPU and GPU cycles to push them well over 1,000 teraflops — and maybe even discover a pulsar in the process." From their forums: "At 14:45 we had 989.2 TFLOPS with an increase of 1.3 TFLOPS/h. In principle that's enough to reach 1001.1 TFLOPS at midnight (UTC) but very often, like yesterday, between 22:45 and 22:50 there occurs a drop of about 5 TFLOPS. So we will have very likely hit 1 PFLOPS in the early morning tomorrow. "

Comments

Re:10001.1 TFLOPS, eh?

[Unknown Lamer]

I don't think the poster is a native speaker and I fixed a bunch of other obvious typos... but missed that extra zero there.

Re:folding@home

[Aqualung812]

I'm not sure people realize that SETI has basically already failed. They've covered their entire spectrum numerous times

The entire spectrum? We've only looked at one frequency range on 20% of the sky:

SETI@home is basically a 21-cm survey. If we haven't guessed right about the alien broadcasters' choice of hailing frequency, the project is barking up the wrong tree in a forest of thousands of trees. Secondly, there has been little real-time followup of interesting signals. Lack of immediate, dedicated followup means that many scans are needed of each sky position in order to deal with the problem of interstellar scintillation if nothing else.

With its first, single-feed receiver, SETI@home logged at least three scans of more than 67 percent of the sky observable from Arecibo, amounting to about 20 percent of the entire celestial sphere. Of this area, a large portion was swept six or more times. Werthimer says that a reasonable goal, given issues such as interstellar scintillation, is nine sweeps of most points on Arecibo's visible sky.

Quoted from http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti/3304561.html?page=5&c=y

Also, when there is no work to be done, your computer can look at other things.

I donate my time to several medical studies that will likely find some results that will help all people. I also donate some time to climate research that has less of a chance of helping EVERYONE. I also donate some time to SETI which has a very, very small chance of changing the world.

It is called hedging your bets. I spend some CPU on things with low risk and low reward, and others on things with high risk and high reward.