This news is a little bit old but it only makes it that much more impressive. In comparison the world's fastest supercomputer is only just under 1.8 Petaflops and costs much to build, run, and operate.

"Folding@home the largest distributed computing effort has 8.3 petaflops of computing power in active utilzation.

This effort represents one of the larger current "World Computers" -400,000 active for folding@home, 30,000 GPGPUs provide 68% of the processing and 36,600 Playstations 3 represent 25% of the rest of the processing power.

The number of machines with GPGPU co-processing or that will have cell processors will increase as a percentage.

AMD Fusion which combines standard processors with a GPGPU is currently expected in the second half of 2011.

Intel Larrabee chis is expected for 2010 and should have 1-2 teraflops of performance.

The Nvidia and AMD GPGPUs will be shifting to 40 nm processes (in 2009) and then to 32 nm (2010-2011). The new chips faster and more energy efficient. Nvidia has taped out 40 nm GPGPUs.

Participation continues to grow and if by 2011 almost all of about 1 million active participating computers had 1 teraflops of performance then the combined power would be 1 exaflop.

There are over 1 billion personal computers and annual sales are about 300-400 million worldwide each year.

By 2015-2020, such World computing systems

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/05/beyond-cloud-computing-global-computers.html

That number is too big for anybody to even comprehend.

and what has it done?

Well in 2011 if it reaches 1 exaflop it will be 100 times faster than the newest most powerful computer scheduled to go online that year and about a decade (at least) ahead of what supercomputing would be capable of reaching otherwise.

It's done absolutely nothing lol probably would be more practical to develop a supercomputer capable of folding my jeans for me.

So it exists only to invent new words for computing power?

uhm.....yeahhhh

^Sounds like a noble goal to me!