The MilkyWay@home Challenge

BOINC Pentathlon isn't the only distributed computing challenge in which team Gridcoin is participating these days. You can check here for a full list, team Gridcoin has also recently competed in MilkyWay@home and Einstein@home. Winning both challenges, of course! For some reason, team stats for Milkyway challenge are missing, but I've kept a screenshot (taken only 8 hours before the challenge ended, so numbers are pretty accurate):

Yes, in Milkyway challenge, team Gridcoin amassed nearly as much BOINC credits as all other teams combined. Milkyway@home BOINC project is well-known for its short tasks and fast workunit turnaround, making BOINC bunkering impossible and Gridcoin team raw computing power all the more visible.

Although we scored an impressive first place in Milkyway challenge team rankings, in user rankings the competition for the first place became quite intense when user GIPICS joined the challenge. My hardware was seriously outmatched, but with all altcoins increasing in value (Gridcoin included), I decided to spend some money on two Amazon EC2 GPU instances and then, with the help of Amazon's 16 x K80 Nvidia Tesla GPUs, I was able to overtake GIPICS (literally in the last couple of hours before the challenge ended).

Final user standings for Milkyway@home challenge.  Out of top 15 users, 9 are from the Gridcoin team  :)

And here it is, Amazon p2.8xlarge instance in action - some serious computing power at a price of 7.2 USD per hour (screenshot taken from my Milkyway hosts list). You can hide your hosts, if you don't want this data displayed to the public. I had to use Linux for this instance, because Windows unloads the GPU driver when managed remotely, disrupting GPU computations. Of course, Milkyway@home has CPU applications too, so don't worry if you don't have a powerful GPU in your PC - you can still participate with your CPU.

So, as you can see, the world of computational science isn't as boring as you might think! Competition is intense and will become even more intense as more BOINC crunchers are joining, attracted by the increased value of Gridcoin (it hit 5 cents today, now it's at 4.3 cents). And you'll help scientists to map the Galaxy (Milkyway@home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream). Beats Proof-of-Work hashing flat out, if you ask me.