The World Year of Physics 2005 is a United Nations endorsed, international celebration of physics. Events throughout the year will highlight the vitality of physics and its importance in the coming millennium, and will commemorate the pioneering contributions of Albert Einstein in 1905. Through the efforts of a worldwide collaboration of scientific societies, the World Year of Physics brings the excitement of physics to the public and will inspire a new generation of scientists.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published his famous Special Theory of Relativity and overthrew commonsense assumptions about space and time. Relative to the observer, both are altered near the speed of light: distances appear to stretch; clocks tick more slowly.

A decade and a year later, Einstein further challenged conventional wisdom by describing gravity as the warping of spacetime, not a force acting at a distance. Since then, Einstein's revolutionary insights have largely stood the test of time. One by one, his predictions have been borne out by experiment and observation.

But it wasn't until much later that scientists accepted one of the most dramatic ramifications of Einstein's theory of gravitation: the existence of black holes from whose extreme gravity nothing, not even light, can escape. Major advances in computation are only now enabling scientists to simulate how black holes form, evolve, and interact. They're betting on powerful instruments now under construction to confirm that these exotic objects actually exist.

Help Einstein@Home search for evidence of gravitational waves, predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but never detected. The project searches for "spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) [which are likely to emit gravitational waves] using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations." The first production run of Einstein@Home "carries out a search for pulsars over the entire sky, using the most sensitive 600 hours of data from LIGO's third science run, S3" which made observations between October, 2003 and January, 2004.

The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. The project currently runs one application, an all-sky pulsar search. Note: Each work unit is 12 MB, and the deadline for returning the results of a work unit is 7 days. A work unit takes about 9 hours to finish on a Pentium 4 2.5 GHz CPU. Because of these factors, the project is recommended for users with faster systems and a broadband Internet connection. The graphical screensaver displays "a rotating celestial sphere showing the known constellations, along with the current zenith positions of three gravity wave detectors. Also shown are the positions of the known pulsars and supernovae remnants, and a marker indicating the positions being searched as the calculations proceed." See a detailed description of the screensaver. Version 4.79 of the pulsar search application is available for Windows as of February 11, 2005. Version 4.80 of the pulsar search application is available for Linux as of February 11, 2005. Version 4.78 of the pulsar search application is available for Mac OSX as of February 11, 2005.

Feb 20, 2005 Team Castle Cops is created.

Join Einstein@Home

• Rules and policies [read this first]
  
• Getting started
  
• Create account

If you already run BOINC click here to join the Castle Cops Team. (Team ID=866)

Download BOINC [Use version 4.19 or greater!]

So What The Heck Is BOINC?

BOINC is a software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources.

The BOINC's features fall into several areas:

• Resource sharing among independent projects
• Project features
  • Flexible application framework
  • Security
  • Multiple servers and fault-tolerance
  • System monitoring tools
  • Source code availability
  • Support for large data
  
  
• Participant features
  BOINC provides the following features to participants:
  1. Multiple participant platforms
     The BOINC core client is available for most common platforms (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and other Unix systems). The client can use multiple CPUs.
     
  2. Web-based participant interfaces
     BOINC provides web-based interfaces for account creation, preference editing, and participant status display. A participant's preferences are automatically propagated to all their hosts, making it easy to manage large numbers of hosts.
     
  3. Configurable host work caching
     The core client downloads enough work to keep its host busy for a user-specifiable amount of time. This can be used to decrease the frequency of connections or to allow the host to keep working during project downtime.

For more detailed information it will be necessary to visit here.


New To Distributed Computing?

One of the most extensive sites I've seen to explain the Who, What, and Why's of Distributed Computing along with Project Descriptions and links as well as other useful information such as what platform it runs on, and whether or not it is modem-user friendly is http://distributedcomputing.info/index.html - run and edited by Kirk Pearson.

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In the following thread, I'll post some information concerning the GUI and Screensaver versions. This will help a user distinguish between the different symbols in the display, and have a better idea what is going on while Einstein@Home is running.

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The Einstein@Home Starsphere Screensaver

• Stars and Constellations
  
  The rotating sphere shows the major stars of the constellations. You may have trouble at first recognizing some of the constellations; they will be backwards from what you are accustomed to because you are viewing them from outside the celestial sphere. You can use the mouse (as described below) to zoom to the inside of the celestial sphere, where the constellations will look like they normally do in the night sky.
  
  (click on image for 1024x768 display)
  
  
  
  
• Gravity Wave Observatories
  
  Each of the "L" shaped markers on the starsphere represents the current zenith position (point directly upward) for one of the instruments which collects the data analyzed by Einstein@Home. The "L" shape comes from the fact that the detectors are basically very large Michelson interferometers. The orientation of the detectors is correct, but they are not to scale.
  
  

  	LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO),	Hanford, Washington, USA, (N 46.45°, W 119.41°) consisting of two interferometers, one with 4km arms (H1) and one with 2km arms (H2).
  	LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO),	Livingston, Louisiana, USA, (N 30.56°, W 90.77°) consisting of one interferometer with 4km arms (L1).
  	GEO600,	Hanover, Germany, (N 52.24°, E 9.81°) consisting of one interferometer with 600m arms.

  
  
  If you have set your system clock to the correct time then the instruments will be shown in the correct relationship to the stars on the celestial sphere. If you watch over the period of a day
  you will see that they move around the celestial sphere once in a period of 24 hours.
  
  
  
• Pulsars and Supernovae Remnants (SNRs)
  
  The purple dots represent the known pulsars, which have been detected electromagnetically. Notice that these are clustered in the plane of our galaxy (the Milky Way), predominantly toward the center of the galaxy. You may also notice two small clusters of pulsars in the celestial southern hemisphere. These pulsars are located in the large or small Magellanic Clouds.
  
  (click on image for 1062x349 display)
  
  
  The dark red dots represent the known supernova remnants. These are also clustered toward the center of the galaxy. Supernovae remnants are of particular interest for gravity wave hunters because some of these supernovae may have left behind a pulsar or spinning neutron star which might produce periodic gravity waves.
  
  
  
• Search Marker
  
  The orange marker shaped somewhat like a gun-sight represents the current position in the sky which is being searched. The location is also noted in the lower right corner in celestial coordinates (Right Ascension and Declination). You will see this marker move from point to point as the search progresses. Details on how we search for gravity waves coming from a particular source will be linked from here sometime in the future.
  
  
  
• Mouse and Keyboard Controls
  
  When the graphics are displayed in a separate graphics window (rather than as a screensaver) you can control the display with the mouse and keyboard. To zoom in or out or rotate the starsphere hold down the appropriate mouse button and move the mouse up and down or left and right.
  
  

  Mouse Button	Action
  Right	zoom in or out
  Left	rotate the star sphere

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