Seems like they (Ohio’s University of Toledo) may be doing vaguely similar research, but with a very expensive computer cluster:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/petaflops_covid/

With widespread participation distributed computing can do much more than all supercomputers from TOP500 list. :)

With widespread participation distributed computing can do much more than all supercomputers from TOP500 list. :)

In principle, maybe. In practice, it comes nowhere close. (The TOP500 (4,864,000 TFlop/s) can do in 4 minutes what SiDock@home (36 TFlop/s) does in 1 year.)

David Anderson analyses this missed opportunity at length in his BOINC in Retrospect. (TL;DR: Needs more promotion, understanding, trust, …)

Significant part of nominal TOP500 performance related to GPUs. Adding results of benchmarks for GPUs and for CPUs in one "bag" is not good thing, I think.

And, of course,

... Needs more promotion, understanding, trust, …