Keynote: Supercomputing for everyone (and by everyone!)
In the past 15 years, the development of @Home computing projects has created some of the most powerful computers on the planet. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home harness the idle computer cycles of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to analyze large data sets and to carry out large scale simulations and studies. How does this work? What motivates people to participate in these projects? To help answer these questions, I will talk about the Einstein@Home project, which I direct. Einstein@Home uses donated computer time to search for new neutron stars in radio and gravitational-wave data.
by Bruce Allen on July, 1st at 10:00 in Track I
Bruce Allen was born in Boston in 1959. He received a BS in Physics from MIT in 1980, and was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received a PhD in Gravitational and Cosmology in 1984, working under the direction of Stephen Hawking, on problems related to early-universe cosmology. Allen was subsequently a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and the Observatoire de Paris – Meudon. In 1989 Allen took up a faculty position at the U of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He was promoted to full professor in 1997, around the same time that he started working on gravitational wave detection. In 2006 Allen was named a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (the Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. Allen is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Physics (UK). He founded and directs the Einstein@Home project, a volunteer distributed computing project that searches for unknown neutron stars using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector and the Arecibo Observatory.
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow