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'BlackHoles@Home' Will Use Your PC For DIY Gravitational Wave Analysis (phys.org) 50

West Virginia University assistant professor Zachariah Etienne is launching "a global volunteer computing effort" analyzing gravitational waves from colliding black holes, reports Phys.org: "As our gravitational wave detectors become more sensitive, we're going to need to greatly expand our efforts to understand all of the information encoded in gravitational waves from colliding binary black holes," Etienne said. "We are turning to the general public to help with these efforts, which involve generating unprecedented numbers of self-consistent simulations of these extremely energetic collisions. This will truly be an inclusive effort, and we especially hope to inspire the next generation of scientists in this growing field of gravitational wave astrophysics."

His team -- and the scientific community in general -- needs computing capacity to run the simulations required to cover all possibilities related to the properties and other information contained in gravitational waves. "Each desktop computer will be able to perform a single simulation of colliding black holes," said Etienne. By seeking public involvement through use of vast numbers of personal desktop computers, Etienne and others hope to dramatically increase the throughput of the theoretical gravitational wave predictions needed to extract information from observations of the collisions.

Etienne and his team are building a website with downloadable software based on the same Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC, system used for the SETI@Home project and other scientific applications. The free middleware system is designed to help harness the processing power of thousands of personal computers across the globe. The West Virginia team has named their project BlackHoles@Home and expects to have it up and running later this year.

They have already established a website where the public can begin learning more about the effort.

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'BlackHoles@Home' Will Use Your PC For DIY Gravitational Wave Analysis

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  • Using the laptop to help measure gravitational waves is a pretty nice way to help, although I have to say after the forth or fifth drop the screen started acting up a bit so I had to discontinue.

  • ...about all of these efforts. Given the speed of modern computers, is this reasly needed? Or is it make-work, for publicity?

  • by albeit unknown ( 136964 ) on Sunday April 14, 2019 @01:30PM (#58436452)
    Sorry, my attention span's just too short for that random link-vomit of a page.
  • Colliding black holes are a lot more interesting than finding aliens.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Distributed.net started in 1997 and Mersenne.org in 1996, both for solving math problems on volunteer computers. SETI@Home started a couple of years later and it made these things more famous. All the later "@Home" computing projects are copy cats of these in some way.

      Still, I think "copy cat" is a little harsh. You could say that every website out there is a copy cat of the original server at CERN, or maybe they are just using the same technology and ideas.

  • Now say it with me..."Because black holes matter"

  • My question is: is it CPU only or can it be run on the GPU? And multi threaded or single threaded?
    One of the main reasons I stopped running BOINC and switched to Folding, is that BOINC projects are almost all single threaded CPU tasks, they just decide to run multiple tasks at the same time. I'd much rather complete a single task in 2 hours and get a new one immediately, than run 8 tasks for the next 16 hours.

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