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BOINC Project to Search for Gravitational Waves
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."
So far, this would seem to be the 3rd BOINC project after Seti@Home and Predictor@Home.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Yes and that's what BOINC is, a generic framework for these types of tasks.
SETI@Home on BOINC
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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.
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.
Banaaaana!
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 hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly. The typical example is: if the sun disappeared right now, would Earth immediately hurl off into space, free of our orbit, or would it take 8.5 minutes for the loss of the gravitational field to be felt?
But perhaps the most interesting question of this entire thread could be: if gravity waves could be harnessed, could they be shielded too? I hope Podkletnov or Ning Li can find out! Anti-gravity here we come!
Scientific progress goes BOINC?
I work in physics research at the moment and when I first discovered distributed computing years ago I thought that eventually pretty much all research would end up using it. However, the problem with the seti@home model is that in order to get your user base you have to be doing a project that is 'cool' enough to get the attention of the public. 'We are looking for ET' is something that everyone understands and many people are interested in the possibility of alien life so you can get a large user base. Plus, it helps that the screen saver is perty! Trying to find a cure for cancer or AIDS is something else that would attract loads of people (in fact I remember taking part in such a DC project a couple of years back - dont know if its still going). However some projects would find it more difficult to attract the public. For example I am involved in modelling things called 'photonic crystals'. Now these things are very cool in my opinion but they take a bit of explaining to a non-physicist. In my experience - after I get started explaining them to any non-geek their eyes glaze over and they just dont care. Now I may be just rubbish at explaining stuff but I suspect (or is that hope??) that if you can't sum up your project as simply as 'The search for ET', 'Cure for Cancer' or 'Win 100,000 by finding a HUGE prime number' then getting computer power out of the public will be almost impossible. But then thats what the grid is for I guess.
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
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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).
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
This is one of many projects related to GriPhyN (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!
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
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
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.
LIGO Hanfod 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.
:P, got to love America's fear of nuclear power.
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
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.
Fight AIDS at home is just such a project.
While I agree that there are factors that prevent this from being used by everyone constantly, large-scale projects can often have a marketing twist put on them, or offer incentives. Additionally, an especially cool geek project would certainly pull a few volunteers. The important part is getting the awareness of the project to the proper audience, as the internet expands, I cant imagine a worthy cause not being able to find volunteers.
Scrame: Sunglasses are for assholes.
No. You'd have the effect before the cause would be visible. The cause, however, would still precede effect.
No, for at least some moving observers you do wind up with the effect preceeding the cause. It's all part of relativity. Two observers moving in opposit directions can dissagree about the order of two events. If anything exceeds the speed of light one of the observers will see the effect preceed the cause on the time line.
There is no such thing as "simultaneous", it's all relative.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As written up at the back of Wired mag a few years back.
http://www.geo600.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 =)
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
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.
For a while I worked as a research programmer for one of the General Relative Groups working on the GEO600 Gravitational Wave Detector 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, 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.
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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/-/0
The most likely thing to actually catch one is the proposed space based interferometer:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/g
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln