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First Pulsar Discovery By an @Home Project
pq writes "In a paper published today (abstract) in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany." The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing is hard to swallow; there are quite a few distributed projects out there, several of which have reported positive results, such as the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne number.
First Pulsar
Judging by Folding@Home's long list of results I'd say they would also dispute the 'first scientific discovery' claim.
Lest we forget everything Folding@Home has done..
how is babby formed?
Perhaps they accidentally their claim and meant to say that it's the first stellar discovery by distributed computing? I'm fairly confident SETI@home hasn't discovered anything conclusive yet....
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
While not distributed computing, this isn't even the first crowdsourced scientific discovery; Galaxy Zoo discovered something so weird that people are still trying to figure out what it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp
Yes, BOINC allows people to use idle computing capacity. But if we need plenty of computing capacity today, it is not that hard to get it: It is much simpler to simply rent a few EC2 machines, or get a computing grant from Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Amazon/IBM/NSF (you get the idea), and get such projects done much faster, rather than trying to use BOINC.
SETI@Home (and later BOINC) were revolutionary 10 years back. Today distributed human computation seems to be as revolutionary as distributed computing was back in 1999. reCAPTCHA seems more revolutionary in utilizing idle human capacity for a good purpose (digitizing books). The FoldIt project (see the recent Nature article), which also uses creatively human computation, seems much more fresh and interesting.
Oh wait, it was claimed in something that wasn't the Title, which I guess makes me as stupid as the submitter.
que sera sera.
The enemies of Democracy are
Of course it is not a zero-sum game. My point is that it is less news-worthy today, ***in terms of methodology***, as distributed computing is much more commonplace compared to 10 years ago. I am sure it would have been front-page news if this was done 10 years back.
A Mersenne number is any integer of the form 2^n - 1. If this number happens to be prime, it is called a Mersenne prime. The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
hundreds of thousands of computers running full tilt crunching data for over a decade, and finally we have a winner
First off the claim in an associated release was the "first astronomical object" discovered, not first scientific discovery.
Secondly, even that's not correct. It's the first by a distributed project with an "@" in the name. Just because a project doesn't have @home or @thegym doesn't mean it's not distributed.
For example the PSC (Pulsar Search Collaboratory), which probably ought to be called psc@home or some such had an earlier hit.
http://www.universetoday.com/41006/high-school-student-discovers-strange-pulsar-like-object/
If they want to claim that this was the first pulsar found by a distributed project with @ in the name from Arecibo based data then they're probably correct.
It's a cool find and a great project, don't want to come of as *completely* jaded and glad Arecibo is getting good use.
Jesus Christ, get a life, stop arguing about which distributed computing program discovered something first. If the summary was bad, then it was bad. You guys need to get out more and stop being dorks.
Remember the guy that retrieved his stolen laptop because it kept searching for aliens even when under the thief's possession!!!
One of the things that wasn't talked much about in the press conference was that the software heavily utilizes the GPU over the CPU when compatible hardware exists. I meant to bring it up somehow, but I was happy to be done and off camera after an hour. Media events, while interesting, require a lot of sitting still, being quiet, and not sneezing.
Yes, the technology for doing distributed computing is now over ten years old and I was a very early adopter. So as some people pointed out that's not new 'news' anymore per say. What is computationally newer is that the projects now don't just expand at Moore's law's rate anymore and as GPUs get better it will increase much faster for the next few years until leveling off at some new growth rate. Yes I know other things have been found, but finding a pulsar was really cool. Speaking with the scientists and science media all over the world and seeing the full international scope of this project over the last few weeks was also fascinating.
Ten-plus years ago, the methodology itself was news even when there was no results. This news story is about the result coming from the methodology.
Maybe it's not as exciting as the news you'd like to hear, but it isn't sad in the slightest.
The enemies of Democracy are
. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project,
Checking all the links, it doesn't look like this claim is made anywhere. The MSNBC Cosmic Log article does say "The pulsar discovery ... marks the first time Einstein @ Home has had a hit," but that's it.
Prior to this, I only knew of two distributed computing projects, SETI and DESCHALL. DESCHALL was an effort in the mid 90's to prove to the government that their Data Encryption Standard (DES) was not a secure encryption type, and it was successful in 1996. 14 years before this event.
When are the aliens getting here?
Galaxyzoo's http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2009/07/11/unveiling-hannys-voorwerp-one-step-at-a-time/ finest hour and this is a distributed computer project except with humans as transistors.
Back when throwing in my CPU cycles added a small to moderate increase to power consumption, I was happy to run these clients. But, the last time I checked, my gaming rig's power draw nearly tripled going from as low as I could get it (drives spun down, video idle, CPU clocked way down, etc.) to having all 4 cores and both graphics cards maxed. Nevermind the heat that comes pouring out and the noise when all the fans ramp up. It's not like the old days when loading up your Pentium 3 added an extra 20 watts.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Are you telling me they needed hundreds of thousands of computers to find a watch? Geez...those astronomers are really airheaded.
My signature is in the cloud.
"Brain damage maybe?" - by gront (594175) on Thursday August 12, @05:15PM (#33233148)
"California's alright: SOMEBODY CHECK MY BRAIN" - Alice in Chains
APK
P.S.=> I agree with you, by the by... apk
The couple read about E@h on Slashdot and then they installed it on their computers too. Also, if you watch the press conference (available online) they DO claim this is the first discovery for volunteer computing.