The Universe@Home project is currently running at its highest level of activity to date, with several hundred thousand work units in progress simultaneously and around 300,000 completed per day. Each work unit is a self-contained StarTrack simulation — evolving a large sample of binary star systems through all stages of their lives and returning the final populations of compact objects for analysis. The sheer scale of this throughput is what allows us to map out broad grids of model parameters rather than testing a handful of scenarios: only by exploring many thousands of models can we properly characterise the theoretical uncertainties in binary evolution and make statistically meaningful comparisons with observations.
This kind of computing muscle — donated by tens of thousands of volunteers running BOINC on their home and office machines — is not a convenience but a scientific necessity. The merger rate predictions, spin distributions, and formation efficiency estimates that appear in our papers are only as reliable as the parameter coverage behind them. We are grateful to every volunteer who has kept their machine crunching.
Link to stats: https://universeathome.pl/universe/server_status.php