Einstein@Home

Einstein@Home is a flagship program of the World Year of Physics 2005 celebration of the Centennial of Albert Einstein's miraculous year. It searches for gravitational waves in data collected by US and European gravitational wave detectors LIGO and GEO600.

Estimates indicate that searching gravitational data with the maximum possible sensitivity would require hundreds of teraflops of computing power or more. Therefore LIGO Scientific Collaboration researchers from the Albert Einstein Institute, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the LIGO Laboratory are enlisting the aid of an army of home computer users to analyse the data. Much like the popular SETI@Home project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, this distributed computing project would involve hundreds of thousands members of the general public and increase the computing power available to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration by a factor of ten to one hundred.

The Einstein@Home program is available for PCs running Windows, Linux, and MacOS operating systems. When the PC is not in use, it downloads LIGO and GEO data from a central server and searches it for gravitational wave signals. While running, it displays a screensaver that depicts the celestial sphere, with the major constellations outlined. A moving marker indicates the portion of the sky currently being searched on the PC.

The computing infrastructure for Einstein@Home is based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) created by the SETI@home developers.