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BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves

Posted by simoniker on Thu Jul 15, 2004 01:31 AM
from the bouncing-around dept.
Software Science
Buzz Skyline writes "Einstein@Home is a new, BOINC-based distributed computing project that will analyze data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO). The goal is to perform a whole-sky, gravitational wave survey of pulsars. Beta-test versions of the Einstein@Home screen saver should be available by the end of the summer, and final release is planned for early 2005."
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  • Weren't the SETI@HOME people working on a next generation tool that could be used for varied data analysis/search tasks - like cancer research for example, based on plugins?

    It seems to me that if you're after people donating CPU cycles something generic would be the way to go.

  • The New SETI@Home (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shafe (72598) on Thursday July 15 2004, @01:42AM (#9704820) Homepage
    This is great to hear because it is believed that an advanced civilization would communicate not with radio waves but with gravity waves. Think about it: gravity waves fly right through anything, whereas standard EM waves are blocked by things like planets and dust clouds in space. This is why SETI@Home is a waste of time in my opinion after five years of constant computing and 3,000+ packets.

    Of course, an advanced civilization using gravity waves would eventually switch over to some sort of sub-space/zero-point field communication system that could facilitate instant point-to-point communication between two points anywhere in the galaxy. Guess we'll have to wait for Subspace@Home.
    • http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.h tml

      If these hypothetical advanced civilization manages to find a way to communicate with gravity waves, then there you go; problem solved.
      • Yeah the jury is still out on the speed of gravity. I am worried that the speed of gravity is similar to that of light, or perhaps somewhat faster. But I am hoping that gravitational waves travel instantly throughout the galaxy. If so, then gravitational communication would be a highly desirable means of communicating between any two points in the galaxy.

        The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater, although a URL with more information eludes me.

        I am hopi
        • The US Navy is right now studying using gravity waves to communicate to submarines underwater, although a URL with more information eludes me.

          A URL eludes you because it's not true. We have *never* detected gravitational waves, although with LISA coming up to full speed now it looks as though we very probably will.

          Jeez, consider the basic physics of what you're talking about before posting such rubbish. Here's something to ask yourself: how much information can be encoded within a gravitational wa

          • The US Navy actual does a lot of research of gravity waves, however they are referring to a slightly different definition or nature. Instead they are looking at periodic influences of tides and other aspects of gravity. For example, examining the effects of "gravity waves" on the atmosphere [navy.mil]. It also doesn't help that a component of surface waves on the ocean are also called "gravity waves" since these are waves that are working against gravity. A google search shows the stuff does show up in a lot of Na

          • He said "gravity waves," not "gravitational waves," and although he's confused, he isn't wrong.

            The term "gravity wave" is used in hydrodynamics to refer to large waves at fluid boundaries which are governed exclusively by inertia and gravity. For example, your typical ocean wave. This is as opposed to a "capillary wave" which is governed at least partially by the effects of surface tension and cohesion. In water, the transition from gravity to capillary wave behavior occurs somewhere around a wavelength o

            • Re:Um...No. (Score:5, Informative)

              by Alsee (515537) on Thursday July 15 2004, @03:43AM (#9705234) Homepage
              No. You'd have the effect before the cause would be visible. The cause, however, would still precede effect.

              No, for at least some moving observers you do wind up with the effect preceeding the cause. It's all part of relativity. Two observers moving in opposit directions can dissagree about the order of two events. If anything exceeds the speed of light one of the observers will see the effect preceed the cause on the time line.

              There is no such thing as "simultaneous", it's all relative.

              -
            • If the cause particles (photons) take longer to reach me than the effect particles (gravitons), so what?

              If we can send a faster-than-light signal, we can exploit relativity to send signals into the past.

              First, we need to realise that 'simultaneous' is a relative concept. Consider three evenly spaced spacecraft flying past you in a line. The centre ship fires lasers at the front and back ships, and when the beam reaches them they explode. Simultaneously? No: the lead ship is flying directly away from the

                • You're suggesting that if I draw a lottery (A) and then broadcast the result (B), somebody might get the result before the lottery is drawn?

                  If A and B are simultaneous in your frame of reference, then A will be before B in frames of reference moving in one direction, and B will be before A in frames of reference moving in the opposite direction. So if you broadcast the result using an instantaneous communication device, then the recipient will get the result before the lottery is drawn - at least from som

                    • Now, in this time between receiving Earth's signal and receiving Alpha's signal, the crew of the ship are in the enviable position of knowing the lottery numbers before the draw. They have an instant communicator of their own - so they can signal someone on Alpha, which in their reference frame has not yet held the lottery draw, and they can buy a ticket.

                      Spacetime diagram doesn't work out for this one, unfortunately... Think of a light-cone centered on Earth and another one centered on Alpha - they cross

            • Right, but people were able to zap each other with electricity and make sparks and move compass needles and produce all sorts of other visible effects with electricity, even though they didn't understand the full nature of it. These new experiments are designed to try to detect gravity waves, because we haven't seen any evidence of their existence up until this point. (They've only be theorized.)

              It's like saying the Navy is researching how to use the body of the Loch Ness Monster to power their aircraft c
      • Sort of like saying what is the speed of time?

        distance/time=speed

        anything/0=undefined

        weirdness.

        Our instruments are anchored in time, so how can we measure a wave that warps it?

        We really are stuck in a cave looking at the shadows on the walls.

    • Re:The New SETI@Home (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tqft (619476) <ianburrows_au@NOsPaM.yahoo.com> on Thursday July 15 2004, @01:59AM (#9704878) Homepage Journal
      "This is great to hear because it is believed that an advanced civilization would communicate not with radio waves but with gravity waves"

      Gravity wave communication strikes me as difficult - not sure you would get the bandwidth (high frequency) without a truly monster recoil problem. And building a Gaser - while a truly phenomal feat - you would need to know where to point it.

      Neutrinos might be an interesting communication solution, but you also have the problem of having to point them in the right direction.

      Radio is simpler, needs lower power and even dumb earthlings have some idea on how to listen to it.
      • Neutrinos might be an interesting communication solution, but you also have the problem of having to point them in the right direction.

        Not really. You take a beam of, say electrons, moving at ultrarelativistic energies and smash them into a target thereby generating, amongst other things, relativistic muons. The latter are emitted in a well collimated beam and as they decay to electrons and muon-antineutrinos, the latter are themselves created in a highly collimated beam. All you have to arrange is tha

        • Gravity is instantaneous? What the hell did I miss?
        • Laugh all you want, this stuff does exist.

          Are you talking about communicating at a speed exceeding the speed of light? Does not the current model rule that flat-out?

        • Re:The New SETI@Home (Score:4, Interesting)

          by tqft (619476) <ianburrows_au@NOsPaM.yahoo.com> on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:29AM (#9704973) Homepage Journal
          "Dumb earthlings" is a bit inappopriate; I'd prefer "ignorant earthlings."

          You weren't at the lunch time meeting I was forced to attend - dumb and ignorant are both appropriate, and yes my "superiors" have permanently coloured my view of humanity.

          "We know it's possible since it's a well known fact that hyperspace exists" - references please

          "but we haven't really put much effort into cracking the science, " - I half agree here, but do you know anyone with the cash to setup a research facility for it? where do start, how do you stop filter out the cranks from research positions. While I don't think FTL travel or comms is really possible, there are some truly weird kinks in quantum theory that no-one has truly explored.

          "since who on earth needs faster-than-light communication anyway." - me - give instantaeneous communication (who needs FTL comms)for 2 or 3 months and watch me rake in the big bucks (forex market - arbitaging between New York, London and Tokyo), until I get shut down or bought out. Actually give me a Naser (Neutrino Amplification Stimulated Emitted Radiation), so I can set up a comm link through the Earth rather than being routed through satellites or on cables around the Earth and I could still probably pull it off - should only need a second or two as an advantage and a fast trading program.
          • give instantaeneous communication (who needs FTL comms)for 2 or 3 months and watch me rake in the big bucks (forex market - arbitaging between New York, London and Tokyo), until I get shut down or bought out.

            London and Tokyo are in relative motion. What London thinks are simultaneous events, Tokyo will think are separated by a small interval of time.

            Exploit! Our instant signal from London to Tokyo goes to Tokyo at a time based on London's view of what 'simultaneous' means, and our instant signal back go

        • ...you send an instantaneous gravity wave...

          Erm, our current understanding via Einstein's general theory of relativity is that gravity waves move AT the speed of light. Among other things, this avoids causality problems. Some efforts have been (and are being) made to prove this, and early indicators are that this is so, though we await conclusive testing.

          See the following reference [wikipedia.org].

  • The... what now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Exiler (589908) on Thursday July 15 2004, @01:43AM (#9704821)
    Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory? Who thought up that name? I bet he was responsible for the Illudium Q-Thirty Six Explosive Space Modulator too.

  • Prior art by Watterson? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SB9876 (723368) on Thursday July 15 2004, @01:56AM (#9704866)
    Scientific progress goes BOINC?
  • I was an astronaut testing a new aircraft, when I had a blow out, and the resulting crash left me with no legs, no arm, no eye... err wait...
  • or my digital watch, or my SNES, or my DVD player; they are my only devices with spare cycles.


    Desktop: Seti

    Laptop: PrimeNet

  • Hooray for Boinc! (Score:4, Informative)

    by dj245 (732906) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:06AM (#9704897) Homepage
    Boinc has really brought something to Distributed computing. Once you install the client, adding new projects (like this new Einstein gravity one) is very simple. Instead of signing up, downloading software, installing and configuring it; all someone running Boinc has to do is sign up on the website and copy two lines of text into the client.

    Boinc should open up more distributed computing projects as well, since the server/client infrastructure is mostly prewritten. Since my other Boinc projects have been sputtering and not giving me work lately, maybe I'll give this one a try. More info on Boinc Here [berkeley.edu]

  • BOINC has issues... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sheetrock (152993) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:07AM (#9704904) Homepage Journal
    We've tried deploying BOINC before for distributed biologic research on our internal workstations to create an informal cluster of sorts, with dissatisfying results. While BOINC is considered the provolone cheese of the distributed computing industry, we found that it behaves in a somewhat inconsistent manner.

    For one thing, on most of the workstations BOINC would appear to work very quickly on the data only to crash out well before the computation was created. Indeed, sometimes it would actually crash before any data was processed by the application. At other points it would work for hours and hours without actually achieving anything; closing down the workstations at the end of the day without getting one computed dataset off was quite frustrating. On the workstations that were actually computing datasets we discovered a few started to become bloated past the point of peak functionality within a few months of even casual use.

    While it's possible that it's the inhouse .NET code that could be creating the problem, after several weeks of debugging we're pretty sure it's BOINC related. My suggestion is to steer clear and look for a safer and more reliable API (or roll your own).

    • Ummm it just came out of Beta like two weeks ago... Either you were working with a very early version of the Boinc code, or else you haven't spent a whole lot of time on it... Yes, there is still definitely a lot of work to be done on Boinc, both client and server side. But before giving everyone a blanket recommendation to avoid using something, you should at least waited until the first public release version before doing stability tests...
      • It's certainly been a while since we used BOINC, and while I don't think it's changed too radically over time I was a little harsher on it than maybe I should have been. One lab is hardly empirical evidence, and they were constantly trying all sorts of crazy things with BOINC (a plug-in system, different environments, even interface and design changes) so it's more "let's see what works" than a controlled test situation.

        To be honest, a lot of folks on here would probably benefit from BOINC; it's definite

  • Scientific Progress Goes BOINC.

  • GriPhyN - Grid Physics Network (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bobhagopian (681765) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:13AM (#9704918)
    This is one of many projects related to GriPhyN [griphyn.org] (Grid Physics Network), an organized effort by physicists to bring important data analysis tasks to the home user. Distributed data analysis for LIGO is just one of the many projects that comprise GriPhyN; others include data analysis for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and (I believe) the Large Hadron Collider, which is nearing completion at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. SETI@HOME definitely caught the eye of physicists who, until recently, had been stymied by the lack of funds for supercomputers. While Linux clusters have gone a long way in addressing their needs, they quickly realized that the really data intensive applications such as LIGO, LHC, and SDSS would require something more. I'm excited that I might finally be able to change my screensaver to something other than SETI@Home!

  • Commercial applications of BOINC like software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lifix (791281) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:15AM (#9704927) Homepage
    With the average home computer advancing to higher levels, how long will it be until you can rent out your computer? I can imagine that it would be extreemly profitable to credit say $1.50 per hour of time running in the background of a program. Actually, paying for time is bad, paying for packets is better. Now I am not a trained professional in any way or form (I'll be a senior in HS next year) but I believe that paying people to compute should be cheaper then doing your own processing - and alot faster.

    Most office computers in offices that I have been working in have relativly decent power and word processing doesn't take up much of their resources. Offices could make extra cash by running software in the backgrounds on their computers, if not during the day, then at night or after hours. Hrm, interesting possibilities :-)
    • Whenever distributed computing is discussed, people forget one thing: their electricity bill. A P4 running BOINC will consume 50 to 100 Watts more then one with Boinc turned off. Get a hold of your last electricity bill and figure out how much 24 hours of BOINC will cost you. Scientist will have to make very attactive offers indeed if they want to let you make a profit.

        • Re:No it isn't (Score:4, Informative)

          by kyletinsley (575229) on Thursday July 15 2004, @04:10AM (#9705325) Homepage
          Several companies have tried to create a commercial grid software setup that pays users for their contributions. None of them have taken off. They have trouble getting customers because they don't have an existing user base waiting to crunch. (It makes your sales a little more difficult when you can't say "We can get started immediately." Instead they have to say "If you pay us money, then we'll be able to go out start trying to get all those end users to sign up.")

          The end users meanwhile don't want to sign up to run endless amounts of "test packets" that aren't accomplishing anything. (They obviously don't start getting paid until there's actually customers to crunch for.) It also doesn't help that these companies' software was also kind of bloated and quirky.

          The lure of being able to materially contribute to real science, in areas that are typically underfunded, by donating only idle CPU cycles is quite strong. People will do that for free. The minute you start making them focus on it as a business venture, they start getting very picky and a lot less tolerant.

          I don't think you're wrong, I think there will be some pay-to-crunch type systems existing in the future. But I think they will only be branches off an existing donated network (like Seti@Home). I really doubt anyone will be able to start one from the ground up as a business model. BOINC might be a place to start, but it would need some serious modifications.

          For one thing, the BOINC credit system is based on what the end users' computers self-report. Each client software runs benchmarks of its CPU, and then based on the amount of time it took to finish a Work Unit, reports back to the server how many CS (credits) it should be granted. To guard against cheating, the server will send out the same Work Unit to 3 clients, and all 3 clients will only be granted the smallest number of credits of what the 3 individuals claim.

          It will probably work well most of the time, because you have millions of users, and no real incentive for most of them to cheat. The probability of the same packet being sent to 3 different cheaters is fairly small. (And even if all 3 WERE cheaters and got more credits than they deserved, it doesn't REALLY matter, does it.)

          But in a commercial setup, 100% of your end users have an incentive to cheat. (If you're getting paid $1.50 per credit, it's in every end users' interest to claim as many credits as you can get away with, regardless of how long it actually took.)

          But regardless, I think distributed computing projects are going to be taking off dramatically in the next few years, paid or otherwise. It's going to be pretty exciting to see the kinds of crazy things people will start wanting to crunch with it.

  • H-bomb@home (Score:5, Insightful)

    by po8 (187055) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:19AM (#9704941)

    One of my colleagues likes to tease our students by referring to this volunteer grid stuff as "H-bomb@home". "Sure, your SW says it's doing gravity-wave calculations. I claim that USDoD is using it to do H-bomb (or bioweapon, or whatever) design simulations for free on your computer. Go ahead, prove me wrong."

    IMHO it's an interesting point.

  • LIGO Hanford! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NoYes19 (766616) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:34AM (#9704995)
    LIGO Hanfod [caltech.edu] is a very cool facility. I got to go on a tour of it several years ago while they were in the calibration phase. At the time they were working on mapping the background vibration in the area. Trucks hitting a bump on a highway over 10 miles away left a consistent detectable spike. It was impressive the work that went into identifying every vibration they felt and then setting up monitoring and periodic average noise maps in order to help filter out the background noise to focus on the vibrations from space. LIGO is the king of siesmographs.

    Its interesting that LIGO Livingston seems to be the more PR focused one. Go figure the one in a worse location for this work, but not on a nuclear site gets the PR :P, got to love America's fear of nuclear power.

    If I remember right, there are 5 other international LIGOs, all collaborating on this. It's amazing the expense getting put into verifying this prediction by Einstein. It's never been clear to me why peopel care enough to go to such great lengths to verify this prediction. Anyone have insite in this? Please no philosophical boiler-plate answers...real impact-on-physics answers are what I am looking for.

  • What about the GEO 600? (Score:4, Informative)

    by yem (170316) on Thursday July 15 2004, @04:02AM (#9705301) Homepage

    As written up at the back of Wired mag [wired.com] a few years back.

    http://www.geo600.uni-hannover.de/ [uni-hannover.de]

    Picture two tubes, each exactly 600m long and at 90 degrees to one another in the horizontal plane. Bounce a laser beam off a mirror at the end of each one. The time should be identical. Unless there is a gravitational pulse, in which case one would appear shorter than the other.

    Or maybe this is something completely different =)

    • GEO600 is a smaller version of the LIGO interferometer. It works in exactly the same way but where as LIGO has a huge budget, GEO600's building on site is actually a tin shed in a field in Hanover. For a while I was a research programmer for GEO600.

  • Gravitation Wave Laser Interferometers. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Goth Biker Babe (311502) on Thursday July 15 2004, @06:39AM (#9705807) Homepage Journal
    For a while I worked as a research programmer for one of the General Relative Groups working on the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector [uni-hannover.de] in both the UK and Germany. GEO600 is a UK and Germany co-project.

    The interferometer is a typical Michaelson interferemoter using lasers with two orthogonal branches 600 metres in length. These gravitation events are small. Movements are ~10-E24 metres. It is expected that only one or two events a year will be detected. So it must run 24/7, 365 days a year.

    Naturally you have to remove as much of the noise from the data as possible to detect an event. Mirrors are hung on glass threads as they are thermally inert. It runs in a vacuum. It is temperature controlled. Everything is monitored from air pressure to sisemology. The amount of data being produced is incredible. I assume LIGO is the same hence the distributed analysis.

    GE0600 uses a microwave link to transmit data from the site to Hanover where it is backed up and fat pipes pass it on to partner universities. The 'head end' on site uses triple redundancy and enough bufferage for 24 hours back-up on site.

    You are talking many gigabytes a day and many terabytes a year and some where in this lot will be an event. This is truely the domain of super computing or distributed processing.

    Of course, even LIGO which is larger, is unlikely to spot many events if any and we will probably have to wait until LISA [nasa.gov], the NASA/JPL/ESA spaced based interferometry project is up and running to get decent results.
  • The signal to noise ratio is suprisingly not bad here in /. on this so people must have some interest in it.

    There's a great book called "Einstein's Unifinished Symphony" that covers all this in great detail.

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/04 25 186202/qid=1089891363/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-823243 2-3201747?v=glance&s=books

    The most likely thing to actually catch one is the proposed space based interferometer:

    http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/gr av ity_waves_000727.html

  • Excellent mission; a bit rough on the environment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ishmalius (153450) on Thursday July 15 2004, @07:43AM (#9706177)
    I think this kind of pure science is the best type of endeavor with which the NSF can involve itself. Understanding the basic nature of the universe, and extending Einsteinian physics is an exciting thing.

    That said, looking at the LIGO facility [caltech.edu], it seems like somewhat of a harsh scar on the Louisiana forest. Could they not have been a little 'greener' in their construction of the site? One of their daily secondary missions, after all, is educating students.

    • Re:Many projects (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumJedi (795319) on Thursday July 15 2004, @02:04AM (#9704888)
      I work in physics research at the moment and when I first discovered distributed computing years ago I thought that eventually pretty much all research would end up using it. However, the problem with the seti@home model is that in order to get your user base you have to be doing a project that is 'cool' enough to get the attention of the public. 'We are looking for ET' is something that everyone understands and many people are interested in the possibility of alien life so you can get a large user base. Plus, it helps that the screen saver is perty! Trying to find a cure for cancer or AIDS is something else that would attract loads of people (in fact I remember taking part in such a DC project a couple of years back - dont know if its still going). However some projects would find it more difficult to attract the public. For example I am involved in modelling things called 'photonic crystals'. Now these things are very cool in my opinion but they take a bit of explaining to a non-physicist. In my experience - after I get started explaining them to any non-geek their eyes glaze over and they just dont care. Now I may be just rubbish at explaining stuff but I suspect (or is that hope??) that if you can't sum up your project as simply as 'The search for ET', 'Cure for Cancer' or 'Win 100,000 by finding a HUGE prime number' then getting computer power out of the public will be almost impossible. But then thats what the grid is for I guess.
      • Trying to find a cure for cancer or AIDS is something else that would attract loads of people

        Fight AIDS at home [scripps.edu] is just such a project.

        While I agree that there are factors that prevent this from being used by everyone constantly, large-scale projects can often have a marketing twist put on them, or offer incentives. Additionally, an especially cool geek project would certainly pull a few volunteers. The important part is getting the awareness of the project to the proper audience, as the internet expands

    • Well folks, there you have it. Anonymous Coward has declared it so. No need for further discussion.

      Stop all funding for gravity experiments and go back to making some more of those wonderful bobble-head dolls. I can't get enough of them!

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