How many CPU years will it require?

Since compute time scales roughly as the inverse square of the flow rate, the Tsinghua researchers estimate that a compute time of 460 years on a typical desktop computer with a single core processor is required to simulate flow rates comparable with the upper bound measured in experiments. To extend the simulations to velocities of about 1cm/s or less, typical of practical devices, would require another factor of 400 or more in compute time, for a total of 184,000 years. And to simulate a representative range of carbon nanotube pore sizes would require a further factor of 10 to 100, bringing the total compute time to well over a million years.

Will it require one million years?!

Sign me up for at least two of those million years.

Ingleside,
Two comments (plus one):
Why are you skocked? The official customership of WCG is the PC user who offers the CPU time not used while he is normally using his machine. Members active on this forum are more in the 24/7 category and many have several machines running, but this community of "crunching addicts" is only a small subset of the total number of active members.
In my team (which is close to WCG's target) 82.9 % of currently active members contribute less than 200 credits per day.
It's OK to use this number if you wish to be conservative in your estimates. But you must be aware that you have taken this number on a Saturday (usually the lowest day of the week) and in one of the lowest weeks of the year (August). My global stats spreadsheet does not make computations on CPU times but if I take the number of points last Saturday is 8.2 % below the average since January 1st.

And my additional comment, top of this discussion: of course the 1-million number found in the project details is obviously there to give an idea of the complexity of this task of studying the physical properties of these nanotubes. Certainly it must not be taken as the official target of this project inside WCG. At least not at this early stage.

v.v. the active client count, we see a significant rise since about a week coming from clean installs and of course, where on one hand many will be part time computing, in offset, the number of multicore/multithreaded CPU's contributing continues to rise. Our FLOPS per CPU year contributed has gradually risen from 1.275 in early June to 1.316 yesterday. Last sunday was already 16 CPU years better than the Sunday 2 weeks ago, mid holidays...... more powwah is coming.

Sneak Peek on what we need to fill up to the top of the rim

The date it was printed is on the right of the X-axis... but there's space there, absent a launch date and an orange dot when it might be, the main tick marks spaced at 6 days, the minor at 3 :O