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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
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.