Bruce Allen, director of @einsteinathome and director at the @mpi_grav in Hannover, Germany, recalls:
“I had read about SETI@home in 1999 and thought that a distributed volunteer computing project to search for Einstein's gravitational waves would be a great way to involve the public and get more computing power. At the time, it seemed too ‘special interest’ to really work.
The idea really took off in 2004, when the American Physical Society, as part of its preparations for the World Year of Physics, offered to help recruit volunteers for our project called Einstein@Home.”
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlCz_eNWEc4
Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=MlCz_eNWEc4
To date, nearly half a million people have contributed to the project. On average, about 31,000 computers from 16,000 volunteers provide 13.3 petaflop/s (million billion floating point operations per second) of aggregate sustained computing power. If listed on the Top-500, Einstein@Home would be one of the 100 most powerful computers in the world.