Brian's Einstein@Home Stuff

  
     
  INTRODUCTION  
  LOG     COMPUTERS     CONFIG    RECEIVERS     TASKS 
 

 
 

 

My Computers... I have the following computers participating in Einstein@Home with some others waiting in the wings:


i5
2600K
NOLAN
BIOSTAR
Phenom
?
?
 
 
 

BOINC Configuration... Depending on the system, I may change some settings (Options > Computing preferences).

 

The Receivers... I find the technology and science behind a project such as Einstein@Home to be quite fascinating. In the sections to the right I collate my little bit of research (c/o Wikipedia and other sources) into the receivers that are used to collect the signals used for the prospect.

Einstein@Home uses your computer's idle time to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (often called pulsars).

Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly rotating and non-axisymmetrically deformed. [read more here]

 

  

 MeerKAT radio telescope
 

 LIGO gravitational-wave detectors

 

Fermi gamma-ray satellite
 

Tasks... When a computer is participating in the Einsten@Home project using the BOINC software it downloads and processes work units / Tasks.

Time between work units: I'm curious about the time it takes my computer's GPU to finish a work unit. I've noticed on my main computer that it seems to stop processing at 99%. It then does nothing for a noticeable length of time (the GPU fans go quiet as it's no longer under load). That final 1% takes a long time when surely the system could be doing more. The advice for Einstein@home it to only run one work unit at a time on a graphics card (mainly due to GRAM constraints), but surely if it ran two, it could at least be getting on with one while it's finishing another...

 

I wonder what is going on with these Tasks, here are some being worked on:

From what I can ascertain, "Gravitation Wave search 02 Multi-Directional" indicates this is data from LIGO's "second run, O2, which ran from November 2016 to August 2017, and made 8 detections, 7 black hole mergers, and the first neutron star merger." as mentioned on the LIGO page linked below.

"Gamma-ray pulsar search #5 1.08 (FGRPSSE)" is data from the Fermi gamma-ray satellite, link below.

That's as much as I can figure out so far!
 
 

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