Working HARD!...

[petermcleland]

Yes, that is all correct...It is just an alternative way to search for Pulsars by looking for their associated Gravitational Waves. It needs an enormous amount of number crunching and the World does not have enough computing power to do it all, so they enlist the power of the peoples computers to do this number crunching when the screensaver is running. As well as the CPUs if the computer has an Nvidia GPU, it uses the GPU's massive capabilities for processing fast parallel number crunching streams.

BTW Dave...The Celestial Globe in the screensaver has as you said, many purple dots...They are known Pulsars. There are also, hard to see, dark red spots and these are Super Nova remnants. The globe rotates continuously about a variable axis and is attractive to watch. It also tabulates various data at the four corners of the screen.

The project has been running for five years and a few days ago discovered its first Pulsar. The power of the peoples computers in use is reckoned to equate with one of the great super computers.


Sorry for the oversize on this one to get the detail...Hard to get the perspective of this without it rotating...The nearest are going from right to left and the far ones from left to right. Centreish on the far side you may recognise Orion.


Every now and then when it is busy doing something important it just says this!

[DaveB]

Well.. thats a very novel way of getting things done. If you don't have enough computing power.. enlist as many around the globe as possible! Wonder if I could get FSX to run well using that technique? I bet FS2000 would still run like a dog

ATB

DaveB

[jonesey2k]

A while ago I used to run a similar program called folding@home that simulates protein folding in order to study stuff like Alzheimer's. Don't bother these days as I only fire up my main pc to play games. 95% of the time I'd just surf the net on an old net book and now an Ipad.

[DavidK]

I used to have folding@home running in the background (when my computer's CPU wasn't heavily occupied) and also as my screensaver until I realised it had some static text that had begun to burn itself onto the screen (i.e. that cashpoint look).

I now have either of two projects from "BOINC" (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (!) (http://boinc.berkeley.edu) and yes, the acronym resembles some of my landings) whose screensaver modes don't include anything static.

The first is "Docking", something like folding@home, where number-crunching works through the millions (trillions?) of ways drug-related molecules might attach themselves to ("dock" with) proteins. The second is "lhc@home", where the "lhc" stands for the Large Hadron Collider (yes, that latest-generation particle collider lurking under France and Switzerland somewhere). So far, though, it's been really disappointing -- I've only noticed it in action once (yes, once). I guess it's due to all those problems with the collider that the press have enjoyed reporting.

David K

PS I think Peter's "Einstein@home" is also handled by BOINC. Visit the website (link above) and you'll find a list of the projects currently running.