One Billion MilkyWay@Home Credits or How Did We Get To Know That Galaxy is Rippled

I've been crunching SETI@home and BOINC since 1999 and participated in many different scientific projects with my PCs, but never reached the One Billion Credits Milestone for any particular one. Well, today is that day! I am proud to announce breaking the 1B barrier for MilkyWay@Home - a BOINC project which is using volunteered computing resources around the world to create a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy.

MilkyWay@Home has computed: our Galaxy is corrugated. Why and how... still being researched. One thing that's 100% sure - more computing power is needed (as you can probably imagine, it isn't easy to map the Galaxy). You can contribute too.

The Badges

Most BOINC projects issue some kind of badges to mark important milestones achieved (they are visible through your account). My badges so far, from left to right:

Purple Star - One Billion credits badge
Roman VIII - eight years of crunching for MilkyWay@Home
M/W - Special Contribution Badge (you get this one when you donate some money to MilkyWay@Home, they were without government funding throughout 2015, but they received another NSF research grant in 2016, so they are well-funded now and not accepting donations for the time being).

Full list of MilkyWay@Home badges is available here.

Certificate of Computation

Every BOINC project allows you to create a "Certificate of Computation" with some stats about your contribution. MilkyWay@home estimates I have contributed 865.12 quintillion floating-point operations to their project so far (865 exaFLOPs or 8.65x10^20 floating point operations). I guess only the most hardcore geeks are familiar with quintillions (I had to look it up too) so, in more commonly used teraflops, that's 865 million TFLOPs (8.65x10^8 TFLOPs). True geeks will be even more impressed knowing those are exclusively FP64 operations or so called 'double precision' (MilkyWay@home is one of the few BOINC projects which require FP64 capabilities). FP64 computations are usually more expensive and harder to obtain, requiring professional GPUs nowadays.

One HD7970 is able to achieve 1.1 TFLOP per second on stock clocks (in FP64) and I've been running six of them overclocked for years now (plus some other hardware). Overall, I find that 865 quintillion FLOPs is an accurate enough estimate of my contribution.

Power Consumption and Hardware

So how many watts for such niceties? A lot, as you can probably imagine. I estimate I have spent around 50 megawatt-hours over the years, for MilkyWay@Home. I am currently running six GPUs (HD7970s) placed in two PCs in my living room, dumping up to 2000 watts of heat during the winter (heaviest, Beyond The Edge overclock). So at least I saved a lot on heating bills during the winters :)

Here they are, six watercooled HD7970s. They are now five years old (i.e. ancient), but still among the best for MilkyWay@Home, due to low price and high FP64 performance.

Looks normal enough, when fully assembled and with cases neatly closed - you can map the Galaxy in your living room too! Alright, that blue cylinder (reservoir) is somewhat unusual, but it's shiny enough to look nice :)

The crypto aspect of it

In addition to saving on heating, you can also offset your costs by minting Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency which is rewarding BOINC computations (MilkyWay@Home included). It's simple enough: more computational science -> more BOINC credits -> more Gridcoins. With six HD7970s, you can easily mint 100-110 GRC daily (I am still ramping up after the summer), worth about $4 at current (low) prices. Average price of one kilowatt-hour at my place is about 11 cents, so I can buy around 36 kWh with $4. Running at more or less default clocks, my 7970s consume about 1500 watts or exactly 36 kWh per day, so despite current low prices (1 GRC=3.5 cents currently) I am still running even and Gridcoin is paying 100% for my electricity (although it hasn't recovered yet from the recent drop, caused by worries over Bitcoin).

A Small Cog in The Big Wheel

My contribution, however large, is just one small part of the Team Gridcoin, which is again one small part of the whole BOINC network. In fact, I am only 14th on the list of top MilkyWay@Home participants (ranked by total credit). Top cruncher there has amassed 4.7 billion credits - extrapolating my numbers, he is approaching 0.25 gigawatt-hours in power consumption. As you can see, competition in computational science is sometimes tougher than in Proof-of-Work mining, precisely because you are not computing some meaningless hashing stuff, but actual cutting-edge science.