Some additional WCG stats

[Taffycat]

If your curiosity has been whetted about the WCG and crunching in general, after browsing the threads here in Crunchers Corner, you might find these additional factoids, helpful.

World Community Grid works by pooling the unused power of 1.7 million personal computers from 535,000 volunteers in more than 80 countries. It then makes this computational power available for scientists who might not otherwise be able to afford the high speed computing they require for timely research.

To put its size, power and scope and contributions into perspective, World Community Grid:

• Receives seven computational results from volunteers' PCs every second of the day -- 500,000,000 in all since World Community Grid started six years ago
• Has performed computations for the equivalent of 392,000 years
• Has yielded 31 scientific, peer-reviewed published papers
• Performs computation for projects run by academic and research organizations on nearly every continent
• Consumes only three extra watts of power on the average computer -- less than half used by a seven-watt nightlight
• Performs 400 trillion floating-point operations per second

(I took the liberty of highlighting the penultimate point in bold type, because it addresses a question that most of us have to give consideration to.)

The complete article can be found here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33752.wss

Thank you for looking and hope you might consider joining our crunching team.