Bruce%20Allen,%20UWM%20and%20AEI

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Einstein_at_HomeHistory and Status
Bruce Allen, UWM and AEI
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Einstein_at_Homepre-history

• When LIGO construction began in 1994 it was known
  that searches for unknown pulsars would require
  huge (unaffordable) computing resources.
• In the mid -1990s SETI_at_home showed one solution.
  SETI_at_home was the most powerful computer on
  Earth.
• Many people independently had the idea of doing
  something similar for LIGO. For example in 1996
  or 1997 I had a lunchtime conversation with
  Stuart Anderson (now head of LIGO Laboratory
  Computing). We agreed that it was technically
  feasible to do LIGO_at_Home but we wouldnt be
  able to publicize it or get people to use it! So
  we dropped the idea.

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History of Einstein_at_HomeEinstein Jahr

• In early 2003, the American Physical Society
  (APS) was working with the International Union of
  Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) planning events
  for the World Year of Physics 2005(Einstein
  Jahr).
• Alan Chodos, Executive Director of the APS, asked
  his staff to come up with some ideas for events.
• James Riordon, Director of Media Relations for
  the APS (and a long-time SETI_at_Home user)
  suggested that APS could do something similar for
  gravitational waves. Chodos liked this idea. and
  told Riordon to look into it further, and see if
  he could find someone interested in working on
  it.
• In mid-2003, Riordon contacted several people
  working on gravitational waves, and working in
  the LIGO project. He proposed that APS would
  provide publicity and advertising if they could
  do the technical work.

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History of Einstein_at_Homemy involvement

• I personally learned about the APS proposal for
  the first time at a telephone conference meeting
  of the Executive Committee of the LIGO Scientific
  Collaboration in late September 2003.
• Some internal study and discussion had already
  taken place, and the response was negative.
  There was too little time to prepare, a
  distributed computing search could not be
  meshed with existing analysis plans, the pulsar
  search code was designed for Unix not Windows, it
  would distract people from other ongoing efforts,
  there was not enough scientific motivation, etc.
• I thought that this was too good a scientific
  opportunity to pass by. Other influential members
  of the committee also thought it would be a
  wonderful opportunity for publicity and outreach.
• I volunteered to lead a LIGO_at_Home effort, and
  the LIGO Scientific Collaboration accepted the
  APS proposal.

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History of Einstein_at_HomeM.Alessandra and the
pulsar search

• I was already participating in the LIGO pulsar
  search work, because the effort was led by my
  wife, Maria Alessandra Papa.
• Her team at AEI and UWM had already developed and
  used a search code based on optimal methods
  proposed by Jaranowski, Krolak, and Schutz.We
  thought that this search code could be adapted to
  LIGO_at_Home.
• James Riordon had talked with the US National
  Science Foundation about funding LIGO_at_Home and
  they recommended that we get in touch with a
  Berkeley computer scientist named David Anderson,
  who had built SETI_at_Home and was now working on a
  related project called BOINC.

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History of Einstein_at_HomeBOINC and David Anderson

• Marialessandra and I were intrigued but were
  suspicious because we had previously had
  difficulty in working with computer scientists.
  We had a long phone conversation with David
  Anderson in early October 2003. David seemed
  very knowledgable and down to earth and
  explained how his experiences with SETI_at_Home had
  led him to develop BOINC.
• We realized that David Andersons experiences
  with SETI_at_Home had taught him a lot about
  volunteer distributed computing, and it would be
  better to take advantage of this experience than
  to do it ourselves. So we decided to adopt
  BOINC for LIGO_at_Home.

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History of Einstein_at_Homefirst proposal to the
NSF

• We needed people to work on LIGO_at_Home. For this,
  we needed funding.
• In January 2004, I gathered together people from
  AEI, the LIGO Lab, UWM, Cardiff, Glasgow, and
  Berkeley, to submit a funding proposal to the US
  National Science Foundation.
• We needed a better name. I proposed GW_at_Home, but
  in developing the proposal, Rejean Dupuis asked
  Wouldnt the name Einstein_at_Home be much better?
• The NSF proposal was submitted in February 2004
  and rejected in July 2004.The reviewers were
  also not convinced that members of the general
  public would be interested in this project.
• We had a choice try again to get funding, or
  just go ahead. We decided to just go ahead.

Suffice it to say, the project has been almost
TOO well conceived and organized (again, I found
the level of detail quite singular).
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History of Einstein_at_Homedevelopment and launch

• We gathered volunteers Reinhard Prix (AEI) David
  Hammer (UWM) Eric Myers (Vassar) Bernd
  Machenschalk (AEI) Badri Krishnan (AEI) Xavier
  Siemens (UWM) Greg Mendell (LIGO Lab) Steffen
  Grunewald (AEI) Teviet Creighton (LIGO Lab) and
  some others.
• Between July and December 2004 we worked very
  hard. We wrote the screensaver, developed the
  science application and validator, and started
  testing.
• There were lots of bugs and problems. Until
  then, BOINC had only been used seriously by
  ClimatePrediction.Net and by a SETI_at_Home test
  project. There was no screensaver interface or
  BOINC Manager for Linux or Macintosh. We helped
  develop these, and found and fixed a lot of bugs
  in the BOINC application libraries and BOINC
  server side software.

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History of Einstein_at_Homedevelopment and launch

• Starting in November 2004 we began to test
  Einstein_at_Home using members of the LIGO
  Scientific Collaboration as testers.
• In January 2005 we began accepting test users
  from outside the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
• We officially launched Einstein_at_Home on February
  19th, 2005, at a press event at the annual
  meeting of the American Association for the
  Advancement of Science.
• In August 2006 Einstein_at_Home received funding
  from the US National Science Foundation. With MPG
  and NSF support, the project should improve
  significantly over the next couple of years.

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How big is Einstein_at_Home?
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User/Credit History
http//www.boincsynergy.com/stats/
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Current performance
http//www.boincstats.com/
Einstein_at_Home is currently getting 80 Tflops
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80 Tflops is a lot of computers!

• For comparison purposes

• Worlds largest web hosting center is in
  Karlsruhe, Germany (owned by 11)
• Hosts more than 1/3 of the web sites in Europe
• Technical staff 100
• System administrators 20
• Construction cost 28 M
• 30 000 servers (total)
• Computer rooms 2 000 m2
• 15 MW power consumption
• About 60 Tflops total

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S3 results no pulsars found
All sky maps With fake signals No fake signals
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Work currently in progress

• Postprocessing of the S4 results (Holger Pletsch)
• First S5 analysis (will be finished around the
  end of January 2007).
• The first hierarchical search of S5 data code
  and data preparation is underway right now! We
  hope to have this running by the time that the
  first S5 analysis is finished.
• Targeting the search to the most likely regions
  of sky and frequency.

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Einstein_at_Home UsersTHANK YOU!