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Software Science

BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves 206

Posted by simoniker from the bouncing-around dept.
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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BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves More

BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves

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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 @02:42AM (#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
          The project the article mentions is going to try to determine whether or not these waves even exist at all. How could the Navy be trying to manipulate something to be used for communication, when we don't even know if that 'thing' exists or not? Seems like you'd want to discover the existence of something before trying to use/change it...
          • My guess is that the Navy would be using density waves in the water. Infrasound, basically.
        • AFAIK, and as far as i remember from school and from books by Hawking, gravity travels at the speed of light.
        • I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly.

          The project name should have been a clue. Einstein's general theory of relativity means that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Another feature is that anything that has energy also has mass. So light can be affected by gravity, which is what this project is all about!

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • 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

        • I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly.

          As you yourself mentioned, the jury is still out on this one.

          The general consensus of the scientific world is that gravity probably travels at the speed of light, but the important point is that no-one has been able to measure it. Einstein's theory predicts that gravity travels at the speed of light, but if some experiment shows the speed to be something else, then the
        • if the sun disappeared right now

          If giant balls of hydrogen, many times as massive as the earth, could just up and disappear, we'd have much bigger problems than the speed of gravity to worry about. Of course, I understand that this is all hypothetical.

          At least, as we hurled off into deep space, our scientific curiousity would be satisfied.

      • 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.

      • It is more probable that gravity propogates at the speed of light. See here [ucr.edu].
      • I agree with the fact that the jury is still out on the speed of gravitational waves, however most (including myself) expect it to be the speed of light. One can hope that LISA [nasa.gov] will not experience "budget troubles" as it will measure the arrival times of light and gravity from the same source, settling this question.

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

      by tqft ( 619476 ) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `ua_sworrubnai'> on Thursday July 15, 2004 @02:59AM (#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.

      • Re:The New SETI@Home (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Xilman ( 191715 )
        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

        • Fascinating neutrino work. Love the little suckers.

          But my bad - I should have said what I meant.

          A radio wave spreads out easily - without a specifically designed antenna and covers all space easily to limit of detection sensitivity.

          A neutrino beam is exactly that. Unless you know where to point it, you are not going to communicate to anyone unless you are amazingly lucky. So once you found an alien civilisation a neutrino beam comm channel could be useful.

  • The... what now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Exiler ( 589908 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @02:43AM (#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 @02:56AM (#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...
    • Unfunny, OK I can live with that, +1 funny is better, but hey, a lot of people here probably weren't alive in the 70's.

      Modding me as troll was a waste of mod points. Like all things that strive to be funny but fail, they should be ignored.

      Sheesh, wait until Oscar Goldman hears about this, you will be so sorry. Now Jamie called, and I got to pick up some dog food for are dog. You would think a dog that is mostly electronic wouldn't eats so much.

      That reminds of the time I met Bigfoot...
  • or my digital watch, or my SNES, or my DVD player; they are my only devices with spare cycles.


    Desktop: Seti

    Laptop: PrimeNet

    • "Score 0 Redundant" ?????

      Am I the only one here that finds this attempt at humor actually rather interesting. Given that my pocket calculator probably has more power than the computer system on the Apolo lander (please no debates on whether or not it happened) I can see this comment making a lot of sense for the future of high-powered computing.

    • it wouldnt come out for portable devices. these things need to switch into lower power mode when you arent using them. SNES has a 9MHz? processor so its not going to do all that good. not even sure if it has a floating point processor. dvd players probably dont have great processors either, a separate chip for mpeg decoding to make them cheaper.

      so, you just have to choose which one to run on your computer. probably once we are saturated with these things, it will be very hard for researchers to get anyone

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

    by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:06AM (#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 @03:07AM (#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...
    • "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."

      Apparently you downloaded the Windows version...
    • If you're working with Boinc and it has issues, maybe you should delve into the source code. It is freely available [berkeley.edu] and open source don't-ya-know.

      but then again, you're a troll. rats.

    • 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).

      Of course... Microsoft's code, known to be buggy, cannot possibly be the source of the problem... While code that is currently running on tens of thousands of computers across the globe with utter stability must be the problem.

      From your description, it's

  • All I Can Say. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Effugas ( 2378 )
    Scientific Progress Goes BOINC.

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

    by bobhagopian ( 681765 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:13AM (#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 @03:15AM (#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:2, Insightful)

        by Lifix ( 791281 )
        Millions of people run SETI@home every day, despite the power cost. I currently run three computers, two of which reboot once a week, and a laptop which I reboot once a night. I run seti on all of them and only turn it off when I need the best system performance for benchmarks or games. If there was an option for me to configure my software, so that I made a profit off seti, it would do nothing pay out. In order to target new consumers/users, the payout would have to be significant to bring in users and cov

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

          by kyletinsley ( 575229 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @05:10AM (#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.
          • Well, you could start off with a flexible network that ran whatever you gave people. Then they can sign up for projects that they want to contribute to - start off with free cancer research, aids research, seti research, whatever. Then later on add in new groups they can sign up for that pay. The pay ones get priority of course. You pay per work unit completed, and for each work unit you do it like 3 or 5 or however many times. Diff each of the results. If they are not identical, then resend the packe

  • H-bomb@home (Score:5, Insightful)

    by po8 ( 187055 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:19AM (#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.

    • Re:H-bomb@home (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Better that than the way they used to test the stuff, right? Besides, to defend you need to determine how the enemy will attack.

      Put his fears to rest. Most of this stuff is actually being used so a multinational corporation can get another patent on your computer's time. But all that electricity might as well work for someone instead of pushing flying toasters across your screen.

    • While scanning the einstein@home site I noticed a picture that looked a lot like something I had overflown at Hanford. Blew my mind to see that in fact it is the same facility.

      I cannot overstate the alien devastation that is at the Hanford site. It is by far the most bizarre and scary thing I have ever seen. Nothing in my experience prepared me for what I saw, nor can I describe it to you. The most heinous depictions in movies and games only begin to capture the horror.

      When I first heard of a 300 mil
      • I heard a talk from a guy who was peripherally involved with the handford cleanup - mostly from a chemistry perspective. (When you have huge tanks full of an exotic mixture of sludge that happens to glow in the dark, it is useful to try to avoid doing something that will cause said sludge to explode.

        I was truly astonished by some of the anecdotes he shared. They really have no idea what is in those tanks - the records kept were horrible, and they pumped stuff from tank to tank on several occasions. Ther
      • I cannot overstate the alien devastation that is at the Hanford site.

        Actually, you just did.

    • Re:H-bomb@home (Score:2, Informative)

      by spellicer ( 146331 )
      Moving to BOINC can allieviate this paranoia. The new BOINC infrastructure includes the ability to use the "Anonymous Platform," which means you get to compile on your own code and simply retrieve the workunits from them. All the source is available if you don't trust the project.

  • LIGO Hanford! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NoYes19 ( 766616 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @03:34AM (#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.
    • As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world. I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.
      I overflew Hanford several years ago, and let me tell you, this place is not "cool". No doubt their seismograph is to detect intruders, not to detect "vibrations from space" (lol).
      From the air, the truth becomes apparent, t
      • As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world.

        Obviously, you've never been to Cleaveland! (rimshot!)

        I work at Hanford. You haven't a clue about the past history and present condition of the facility. It is glaringly apparent by your comments:

        I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.

        The tone of your commen

  • Hmmm (Score:2, Informative)

    by Ynazar1 ( 750163 )
    Yet another version of AMOR... Talk about number of choices. For those who do not know: AMOR stands for Amusing Misuse Of Resources, its one of the toys for KDE.

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

    by yem ( 170316 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @05:02AM (#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.
  • 1 Lovelace = the gravitational pull that would be needed to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

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

    by Goth Biker Babe ( 311502 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:39AM (#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

    • The most likely thing to actually catch one is the proposed space based interferometer: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/gra v ity_waves_000727.html

      I've read about this before. How the hell do they plan on keeping that system calibrated?

      The three [spacecraft] are designed to detect gravity waves by measuring subtle changes in the spacecrafts' position. Aboard are instruments sensitive enough to notice positional changes as small as one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.

      Sounds near im

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

    by ishmalius ( 153450 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @08:43AM (#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.

  • In a bit of my research into gravity in general, the discovery and eventual understanding of gravity (waves or whatever they are) would me the most momentous discovery of science in the last 500 years. The eventual ability to alter and manipulate this natural force could mean a lot to science and everyday life. Some suggest that gravity, unlike light, is INSTANTANEOUS. Meaning that its effect is not time measurable, its force propagates throughout the universe everywhere instantaneously. Imagine the possi
  • I'd really like to see BOINC implement some economic principals in their code. By acting as a gateway to multiple distributed projects, they have the perfect framework to implement the concept of comparative advantage in distributed computing [jahana.com]. By efficiently allocating projects to users while still allowing users to choose which projects make progress, more work will get done in less time.
  • finally! ^_^

    *remembers that Dr. Zefram Cochrane (ST) was born in 2030 :-)

  • Sounds interesting. Seems from the site it only works as a screensaver, though. At work we have 3 powerful dual cpu workstations (always on, not always logged in, almost never in screensaver mode) that could contribute if only the distributed program functioned a service. My FreeBSD server at home doesn't even have X, but still have lots of spare cycles that a 'nice -19' gravitational wave daemon could use.

    Just a thought.

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