It is operated by a team that includes astrophysicist Heidi Jo Newberg and computer scientists Malik Magdon-Ismail, Bolesław Szymański and Carlos A. Varela.

Mapping such interstellar streams and their dynamics with high accuracy may provide crucial clues for understanding the structure, formation, evolution, and gravitational potential distribution of the Milky Way and similar galaxies.

[5] The work units that are sent out to clients used to require only 2–4 hours of computation on modern CPUs, however, they were scheduled for completion with a short deadline (typically, three days).

By early 2010, the project routinely sent much larger units that take 15–20 hours of computation time on the average processor core, and are valid for about a week from a download.

As of 12 January 2010[update], these figures were at 44,900 users and 1,590 teams in 170 countries, but average computing power had jumped to 1,382 TFlops,[6] which would rank MilkyWay@home second among the TOP500 list of supercomputers.

That data throughput massively outpaced new user acquisition is mostly due to the deployment of client software that uses commonly available medium and high performance graphics processing units (GPUs) for numerical operations in Windows and Linux environments.