This award supports the continuing operation and development of Einstein@home, a public distributed computing project built using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) and used by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) to search for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars. Members of the general public can quickly and easily install the software on their Windows, Macintosh, or Linux personal computer. When otherwise idle, their computer downloads data from Einstein@home, searchs it for pulsar signals, then uploads information about any candidates. Einstein@home was chosen as key project of the American Physical Society's (APS) World Year of Physics 2005 activities and has been operating since February 2005. More than 100 000 people have participated and the project is currently delivering more than 20 Tflops of computing power. This is (by an order of magnitude) the largest computing resource available to the LSC. This award supports a collaboration between the LSC and the BOINC team to increase the sensitivity of the neutron star search using a more sensitive hierarchical method based on the Hough transform with the potential to increase the number of detectable sources by an order of magnitude, to provide maintenance and support for the Einstein@home server, to provide support for the public users, and to enhance and extend the capabilities of BOINC as infrastructure both for Einstein@home and for other applications of distributed computing. This award will support the production and maintenance of a stable production branch of the BOINC development code and the use of standard software engineering practices such as unit tests on all supported platforms. This will ensure that Einstein@home and other distributed computing projects can achieve their scientific goals without concern for instability and bugs in the underlying software infrastructure.
Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in 1916, but have never been directly detected. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) was built for this purpose. Funded by the NSF in 1994, it is the most sensitive detector of gravitational waves ever built. LIGO has completed four science runs since 2002 and is now in the midst of its first long science run operating at design sensitivity. Hidden in the data from LIGO and its partner British/German GEO600 detector are weak signals from spinning neutron stars, but searching for them requires far more computing power than is available in conventional computing clusters. Einstein@home not only enables this type of search but also allows anyone in the world with a reasonably up-to-date computer to participate in forefront scientific research. Supporting and enhancing the BOINC infrastructure will enable other projects to use the vast number of compute cycles available from volunteer computing and to engage the public in scientific research.
This award is supported by the Physics Division and Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and by the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
