The petaflops of citizen science

It’s hard work discovering the secrets of the universe, and now the Einstein@Home distributed computing project has broken the petaflop – the compute power of approximately 61 million iPad 2 processors – barrier in its quest to find pulsars and gravity waves.

“But,” you might say, “Supercomputers can do circles around that!” True, but if you look at a list of the  top 500 supercomputers, only the top 23 run in the petaflop range. With such a large volume of collected scientific data to sift through, having a petaflop of extra computing resources is nothing to laugh at. And overall, distributed computing contributes much more than that.

Screenshot from the Einstein@Home server status page taken January 3, 2013.

At the time of publication, the distributed computing projects based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software system showed a daily average of 7.2 petaflops across more than 720,000 computers. For perspective, the combined power of BOINC-based projects would rank fifth on the list of top supercomputers.

Distributed and grid computing networks like Einstein@Home, SETI@Home and the World Community Grid provide much-needed, cheap computing power for workload-intensive research projects, and cut down on the costs of building supercomputers. The grid model can also provide scalability and redundancy that a data center would struggle to achieve.

So which will it be: Finding alien intelligence with SETI, proving Einstein’s theories or helping to predict the climate?