This talk is intended for several audiences. For the astrophysicists, we'll talk about Einstein@Home's first two discoveries, in data from Arecibo. The first appears to be the fastest-spinning disrupted recycled pulsar yet discovered; the second is a 48 Hz pulsar in a 9.4-hour binary system. We'll also talk about the methods Einstein@Home uses to search LIGO and radio data. For computer scientists, we'll talk about how volunteer distributed computing works, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) infrastructure behind the project. For sociologists, we'll talk about why people volunteer their computers for projects like this (there are about 100 such projects world-wide). What motivates the volunteers? Why did some of them stick with the project for years, even though it didn't find anything?
For people who don't fall into any of the categories above, we'll talk about interesting things like
-- stars whose density exceeds that of an atomic nucleus
-- the most important untested prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity (which might be confirmed in the next decade)
-- how to combine the laptops and desktops of people from every country in the world, to beat the mightiest supercomputers
-- and how these volunteer computing systems might enable exciting new science in the future.
This page is maintained by Rob Simcoe