Einstein@Home

About Einstein@Home

Thank you for your interest in Einstein@Home!

Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 and an International Year of Astronomy 2009 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations.

Einstein@Home uses your computer's idle time to search for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope, and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite. Einstein@Home volunteers have already discovered more than three dozens new neutron stars, and we hope to find many more in the future. Our long-term goal is to make the first direct detections of gravitational-wave emission from spinning neutron stars. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago, but have never been directly detected. Such observations would open up a new window on the universe, and usher in a new era in astronomy.

To learn more about Einstein@Home, please explore the links under "Science information and progress reports" below, or read some of the popular articles linked from "Einstein@Home in the News" below.

If you want to participate, please follow the "Join Einstein@Home" instructions below. It takes just a minute or two to sign up, and little or no maintenance to keep Einstein@Home running. Einstein@Home is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X computers.

Bruce Allen
Director of Einstein@Home; Director, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Hannover; Professor of Physics, U. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

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Science information and progress reports

First report on the S3 analysis - 2005/09/11
Final report on the S3 analysis - 2007/03/28
Report on the S4 analysis - 2008/05/16
(published in Physical Review D)
Report on the first S5 analysis - 2009/08/11
(published in Physical Review D)
Technical paper on GC search method - 2010/08/10
(published in Physical Review Letters)
Article on E@Hs current GW search - 2010/08/10
Info on the Arecibo Radio Pulsar Search - 2010/01/15
Science article about the first E@H pulsar discovery - 2010/08/16
Additional material about the first E@H pulsar discovery - 2010/08/12
Overview of Einstein@Home Radio Pulsar (Re-)Discoveries:

Arecibo Binary Pulsar Search - 2011/03/02
Arecibo Mock Spectrometer Pulsar Search - 2012/10/16
Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey - 2012/12/05

Tech stuff

More Information

Einstein@Home in the news
Einstein@Home Contributors
einsteinathome.org - APS webpage
Einstein Online
Black Hole Hunter (Game)

News

Two new papers about the Einstein@Home radio pulsar search
Two new papers, which describe the Einstein@Home search for radio pulsars and some of the discoveries, have recently been submitted for journal review. If you are interested in learning more, preprints are available from the Cornell University Library Open Access server:

- The Einstein@Home search for radio pulsars and PSR J2007+2722 discovery

- Einstein@Home discovery of 24 pulsars in the Parkes Multi-beam Pulsar Survey

In both cases, the full text of the paper is available from the Download: PDF link on the top right.

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home 13 Mar 2013 10:10:29 UTC · Comment

Syracuse University rises to the top!
Thank you and congratulations to Syracuse University whose recent average credit value in excess of 3 million is one of the largest that we have seen in the project's history. This represents about 4% of Einstein@Home's total computing power. There must be a lot of Syracuse University campus computers crunching Einstein@Home! Without your help a few weeks ago, I don't think we wouldn't have made it past the 1 Petaflop mark.

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home 28 Feb 2013 22:38:41 UTC · Comment

Einstein@Home passes 1 Petaflop of computing power!
Congratulations and thank you to all Einstein@Home volunteers: sometime shortly after January 1st 2013, Einstein@Home passed the 1 Petaflop computing-power barrier. To put this in context, according to the current (November 2012) Top-500 computing list, there are only 23 computers on our planet that deliver this much computing power.

(One Petaflop is 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.)

Congratulations and thank you again, and keep on crunching!

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home 6 Jan 2013 20:52:14 UTC · Comment

Can Einstein@Home pass the 1 Petaflop (1000 Teraflop) barrier?
The computing power of Einstein@Home has exceeded 950 Teraflops for the first time since the project was begun in 2005. Based on the rate that our computing power has been growing, I am hopeful that Einstein@Home will pass the 1 Petaflop barrier before the end of 2012. Einstein@Home volunteers: please keep your computers running over the holiday season, and please sign up any new ones that you might receive as a gift!

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home 10 Dec 2012 18:51:53 UTC · Comment

Einstein@Home has passed 800 Teraflops!
Many thanks to the DC Russian Union for their ""Pulsar Rampage" computing challenge which helped to push Einstein@Home past the 800 Teraflop computing-power level for the first time in the history of the project!

Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home 27 Nov 2012 10:23:15 UTC · Comment

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