MilkyWay@home is a prominent BOINC project, funded through National Science Foundation and creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy. Their top discovery so far is that the Milky Way galaxy is much larger than previously thought and that the galaxy disk itself is corrugated. Computing for MilkyWay@home is rewarded through Gridcoin - a digital currency which is rewarding BOINC computations.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later! With a large influx of new crunchers, Gridcoin team grew so powerful that the very term 'competition' is becoming a stretch. We now have 4.3 times bigger RAC than the second placed team at MilkyWay@home. Not only that - our RAC is so large, it equals the total RAC of all other Top10 teams combined:
Recent average credit (RAC) is the total amount of BOINC credits the team accumulates in one day. More computations = more credits = more RAC = more science.
Needless to say, our RAC is increasing all the time and dramatically so, while 'competition' is more or less where it was. Three and a half months ago, our RAC was only around 10 million:
This screenshot shows MilkyWay@home team stats on March 14, 2017. Taken from The Internet Archive, direct link: https://web.archive.org/web/20161221221637/http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu:80/milkyway/top_teams.php
Only a month ago, I was the top MilkyWay@home cruncher, but now I am completely overrun by the grcpool.com (a new, very popular and actively developed Gridcoin pool).
Large mag days are fading - to compete with the pool, one would need at least 18 HD7970 GPUs, running 24/7. Crunch some easy GRC while you still can :)
So, I guess we are now approaching the post-team BOINC era, where team competition will matter less and less, because Gridcoin will be undisputed no.1 (can't compete against crypto). I think that even the lifting of mandatory team membership won't change things much, most of the crunchers will simply stay with us anyway, because we are such a great community :)
When I hit 1 billion total credits in Milkyway@home, I guess I'll switch back to Einstein@home, to pursue science. I'll probably earn less GRC, but there is always a very small (and very captivating) chance of discovering a new binary pulsar or even a new source of gravitational waves, read more about it in Gridcoin GPU mining (4) Searching for Gravitational Waves and (5) Looking at the Sky. Which other coins offer such exciting mining possibilites? :)
