News archive
Apr 24, 2009
The Einstein@Home project is finally back up and running properly. The binary radio pulsar search may not be sending out new work for a couple of more days while we fix some VPN problems between the WU generator in Hannover and the project database in Milwaukee. However the S5R5 gravitational-wave search IS sending out plenty of work. Many thanks again to our loyal volunteers and contributors for their patience!

Apr 24, 2009
We have completed the database maintenance and are restarting the Einstein@Home project. Hopefully this will go well, but please be patient as it may take some time before everything is working smoothly again. We are advancing the reporting deadlines for work in progress by 10 days, so that work already completed is not marked as unreturned. Because of the work on the database, contributors will NOT be able to see the status of work that was already completed in the past. However in the future, as before, contributors WILL be able to track this status. No contributor credits have been forgotten or lost.

Apr 23, 2009
The database is still purging, at a rate of about 400,000 workunits per day. We expect that this process will be completed by about 06:00 UTC tomorrow. At that time, we will do some additional database maintenance (table optimization) and then restart the project. So in total about another 24 hours will still be needed to bring everything back to normal. Thanks again for your patience during this unfortunate and long outage.

Apr 22, 2009
We think we have found a simple fix for the database problems. The database has grown to 45 GB in size and has gotten too large for the physical memory of the machine that hosts it. However it turns out that due to some mistakes made in the project operations during the past weeks, about 80% of the work in the database is already completed. So we are running a db_purge task tonight that should remove this already-completed work from the database, leaving only the work-in-progress still in place in the database. If this is successful, then Einstein@Home should be back up and operating normally in about another 24 hours. Thank you for your patience!

Apr 21, 2009
The daemons worked through the backlog last night, but turning on the scheduler this morning for a few hours brought the DB down again. Some of the problems have been identified and fixed or worked around, but we are still working on some issues. The project has been shut down again for some DB analyis runs, it will probably be up and down again a number of times today as we fix the remaining issues one by one.

Apr 20, 2009
We still have serious problems with our database and are working on it. For the moment we disabled the scheduler to let the rest of the daemons work through the backlogs, i.e. no work is sent out or can be reported.

Apr 12, 2009
E@H has been experiencing load problems on the database server for most of this weekend. We are still working to try and get the project back to normal.

Mar 30, 2009
The Einstein@Home project suffered a fileserver crash on Friday March 27 and had more than two days of downtime as a result. The project is running again now and we hope the problems are behind us.

Mar 25, 2009
The Einstein@Home project has started a new search for binary radio pulsars in data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This will run in parallel with the existing search for gravitational waves from rapidly-spinning neutron stars. Please see this press release for more information. A German translation is also available.

Feb 10, 2009
Bored of the old Einstein@Home screensaver? Write your own! Our new BOINC graphics framework should make it a lot easier. Read more about and discuss it in this forum thread.

Jan 23, 2009
The Einstein@Home S4 search results have been published in Physical Review D. The article may be downloaded free of charge. Just push the Download button right above the author list at this URL.

Jan 13, 2009
A new analysis run S5R5 has been started to supersede the previous S5R4. It features a higher sensitivity and shorter workunits. Read more about it in this forum thread.

Dec 23, 2008
A fileserver crashed today and caused several problems you may have noticed. Everything should be working again now.

Dec 13, 2008
The Einstein@Home project is starting limited public testing of a new pulsar search, which uses PALFA radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope. More information about this search will be released in the coming weeks. Message board threads have been started for scientific information about the search and for problems and bug reports concerning the new application. We will post another front page news item when we formally launch this new search on a larger scale.

Dec 10, 2008
The project will be shut down for database maintenance today at 15:00 UTC for about an hour.

Nov 20, 2008
In the next days (probably Monday next week) we will begin testing a new scheduler code. We'll start a specific thread on the Problems and Bug Reports message board to report problems with this new scheduler when we actually start testing. Please prepare for some irregularities while we tune the new setup.

Sep 25, 2008
We have completed processing the S5R3 workunits. S5R3 was the first search using the combined F-stat plus Hough method, which is currently the most sensitive search technique that is known. This search used approximately one year of data from LIGO's first science run (S5) at design sensitivity. The S5R3 post-processing is being led by Dr. Maria Alessandra Papa, one of the inventors of the search technique.

Aug 5, 2008
The server upgrade is mostly complete, and we are now distributing work for our new search, S5R4a. If your personal BOINC installation has behaved strangely in the past days, please be patient. In most cases this will now sort itself out. We still need to track down a few remaining issues: some of the project PHP pages are not working entirely as they should, and there have been some performance problems with the web pages. Hopefully these will be resolved in the next few days.

Aug 1, 2008
Work on Einstein@Home will continue through the weekend and will be finished some time on Monday Aug 4. A news item will be posted when all the work is finished.

Jul 28, 2008
The Einstein@Home project will be shutdown for approximately one day starting some time after 1700 UTC Friday. Leading up the project downtime we might not have enough work to send out to everyone as we are near the end of our S5R3 analysis. During the outage we will be upgrading the hardware for the main project server and starting the new S5R4 analysis run with a new dataset. Your patience is appreciated.

Jul 22, 2008
We are reaching the end of the current analysis run and expect the last workunits of S5R3 to be generated around Aug 1. Participants will probably experience an increase of the downloads necessary for the remaining S5R3 workunits to be processed. Users with low bandwidth will probably want to suspend the project for some days. Users of Beta- and Power-Apps should be aware that they will not get tasks of the upcomig S5R4 run with these S5R3 Apps.

Jun 27, 2008
You can play a game and learn something about gravitational waves at the new website http://www.blackholehunter.org. This project was developed as part of the Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2008.

Apr 11, 2008
The results of the Einstein@Home search on LIGO S4 data have been officially released on the arXiv.org e-print server. This is the first formal scientific publication resulting from the Einstein@Home project. A short public presentation of the results will be given this Sunday at the annual Spring Meeting of the American Physical Society in St. Louis.

Jan 25, 2008
We found that we need to split the current S5R3 run at 800 Hz frequency (read more about it in this forum thread). We are currently ~6 days away from the end of the lower half, which means that we are experiencing the usual workunit-cleanup at the end of a run, with the common raise of downlaod traffic during that time. Dial-up users may want to suspend the project for the next days.

Oct 25, 2007
Einstein@Home will be shutdown for short while today while some updates are made to database. The work will begin at 14:10:00 UTC Oct 25 (today).

Oct 15, 2007
The database problems have been fixed, and the Einstein@Home project is up and running again. Please note that a few contributors may notice some of their results in a strange or incorrect state. Please see this message board thread for more details and to report any problems.

Oct 15, 2007
The E@H project will be down until a problem with the database is fixed. This is taking a bit longer than expected. We expect all the problems to be worked out by Mon Oct 15 23:00 UTC.

Oct 15, 2007
The E@H project will be down until a problem with the database is fixed. We expect all the problems to be worked out by Mon Oct 15 21:00 UTC.

Oct 5, 2007
A description of the latest S5R3 search, and the sensitivity improvements that it gives compared with earlier versions of the Einstein@Home search, is described in this message board thread.

Oct 2, 2007
The S5 science run, whose goal was to accumulate one year of triple-coincident data at LIGO design sensitivity, officially ended at 00:00 UTC October 1, 2007. This completes the data-taking stage of a project which was officially begun in 1992 by Kip Thorne, Ron Drever, and Rainer Weiss. LIGO will now undergo two planned upgrades to improve sensitivity. The first of these upgrades (Enhanced LIGO) will be followed by the S6 science run, anticipated for 2009. Einstein@Home is now busy searching the S5 data set. The Einstein@Home S4 postprocessing and analysis are largely complete and under review by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. We hope to provide updates about these results before the end of this year.

Sept 23, 2007
We have started a new analysis run on LIGO S5 data, called S5R3. This uses a new version of the science application - details will be forthcoming in the Science Message Board area. Users who have been beta-testing the latest app versions should now remove their app_info.xml files.

Sept 11, 2007
We are reaching the end of the current analysis run S5R2, and participants might soon experience an increase of the downloads necessary for the remaining workunits to be processed. Users with rather low bandwidth will probably want to suspend the project for some days.

July 23, 2007
We have released a updated windows application for Einstein@Home. This application will automatically replace the older application and does not require any action from you. The new app should help with cross-platform compatibility and has some other small improvements as well.

July 20, 2007
We have started a new workunit generator that features a variable deadline between two and three weeks, depending on the size of the workunit. Read more about this feature in this forum thread. We have also changed the server configuration so that recent clients will check the input files each time a task is (re-)started. See this forum thread.

July 10, 2007
We have started a new validator. This change is one of the steps needed to get rid of the cross-platform validation problems.

June 13, 2007
Einstein@Home has begun to send out the new Windows App 4.24. It should mainly help us to pin down the remaining bugs in the Windows App code. For this it may download additional information from our Server (or Microsoft) in case of a Client Error. Read more about the Apps features on the Beta Test Page and discuss it in the forum thread mentioned there.

June 13, 2007
The Einstein@Home servers will be shutdown for about an hour while some hardware is moved around. The downtime will start at 9:00 UTC (today) June 13.

May 3, 2007
The Einstein@Home servers might be shutdown for a few hours tomorrow (May 4) starting at 13:00 UTC. There will be some work done on the AC and E@H will only be shutdown if the Temperature goes too high.

April 17, 2007
Some details of the upcomig S5R2 run can be found in this message board thread. In particular dial-up / modem users might not find this project suitable any longer during the last days of S5RI and S5R2.

March 29, 2007
During the coming months, Einstein@Home will be hiring several students, postdocs and staff members in Milwaukee, USA and Hannover, Germany to help with the project. Further information is available in the "Work for Einstein@Home" area.

March 28, 2007
A final report on the Einstein@Home S3 analysis is now available in the "Science information and progress reports" area. Please post any questions and comments on the "Science" message board.

February 25, 2007
The project performance problems and database load problems have been resolved. Details can be found in this message board post. Thank you for your patience while we sorted this out.

February 22, 2007
The repairs described yesterday are still underway. We will have frequent and unscheduled service interruptions while we continue work on this today.

February 21, 2007
The database problems have been identified but in order to correct them some modifications will be needed on the Einstein@Home back-end components. To effect these modifications, the project will have to be repeatedly taken up and down today. So please be warned: we will have frequent and unscheduled service interruptions while we work on this today.

February 20, 2007
Einstein@Home has been having serious problems with database server load. We are working hard to try and find the source of the problem. You will likely continue to have problems connecting to the project and may get messages like "project down" or similar until we fix the problems at our end.

Your patience and support of the project is greatly appreciated and we will try to do a better job of keeping you informed about the status of the project in the future.

January 24, 2007
The Einstein@Home project was offline today due to a server crash. There was a kernel panic on fileserver that is unrelated to previous problems we have had with the fileservers.

January 19, 2006
A couple of days ago Einstein@Home issued the last workunits from our first search of LIGO S5 data. The post-processing of these results will begin in a few weeks when the last result from these workunits is returned. Meanwhile we are gearing up to begin a new type of more sensitive search (called a hierarchical search). Unfortunately this is not yet ready. In the meantime we are extending the first S5 search to a larger range of spin-down ages than previously. We apologize for some problems that occured in the last few days as we finished one search and started another. We are still coping with some hardware problems, which complicated the transition. For further details please see this message board thread.

January 7, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down for the last few days because of the continuing fileserver problems. Another server has been put in place for the primary fileserver and we hope this temporary solution will be stable.

January 4, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down for the last couple days as a result of fileserver problems. The main fileserver has temporarily been replaced and we are hopeful the project will be more stable now.

December 29, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down for the last day as a result of fileserver problems. The project should be totally back online by 18:00 UTC Dec 29.

December 28, 2006
The Einstein@Home project has been having database problems over the last two weeks. Your client will likely continue to have problems connecting to E@H until the problems are sorted out on our end. We are working on the problem and will try to have it solved as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience.

December 22, 2006
The Einstein@Home project will be shutdown for maintenance again between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC Dec 22. More memory is going to be added to the database server. The total after the upgrade with be 32GB (currently 24GB).

December 21, 2006
The Einstein@Home project will be shutdown for maintenance between 20:00 and 23:00 UTC Dec 21. During this downtime we will try to address the recent database performace problems as well as the fileserver flakiness.

December 9, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was offline again from ~19:00 Dec 7 to ~01:00 Dec 9 UTC. The project was shutdown as a precaution while a raid array was rebuilding in the fileserver. During the downtime the fileserver was upgraded to help prevent future failures of this kind.

November 25, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was offline for approximately 24 hours from ~6:00 Nov 24 to ~6:00 Nov 25 UTC. The problems resulted from a fileserver failure.

November 16, 2006
After more than 150 days of trouble-free operation, one of the project's five validator instances malfunctioned and marked about 20,000 results as invalid or validate error. The validator has been restarted and is now functioning correctly. The project is granting credits for all results that were affected in this way. For more details please see this message board thread.

November 9, 2006
The Albert Einstein Institute (MPG) will be hosting a party/event for Einstein@Home participants on Monday 18 December 2006 at 19:00. Everyone is invited! This will take place at the Institute's headquarters, which is south of Berlin (Golm bei Potsdam). For more information please see this announcement.

November 7, 2006
The data mirror at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany will be down for part of the day starting at ~7:30 UTC. E@H participants do not need make any configuration changes to BOINC because your client will automatically find another mirror.

November 6, 2006
Today we passed the 50% complete point on our first S5 search! We estimate that all the work for this first S5 search will have been sent out by about February 10th 2007. Also, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration has recently completed its review of our S3 search, and approved distribution of the final results, which will be posted here in the next day or two.

August 14, 2006
We have begun general distribution of new and faster applications for Linux and Windows computers. Computers which are already running Einstein@Home will automatically download these, so no action is needed by project participants.

July 25, 2006
Einstein@Home will have brief periods on downtime for maintenance today from 0500 to 1000 UTC.

July 17, 2006
Please fill out the BOINC user survey. Your responses will help us improve Einstein@home.

June 21, 2006
Einstein@Home was down for one hour today due to the database server crashing. The outage started at 19:51 UTC.

June 16, 2006
We are beginning large-scale distribution of workunits from LIGO and GEO's fifth science run S5. We have finished generating the remaining S4 workunits, and expect that the processing of these S4 workunits will be completed during the next two to three weeks.

June 16, 2006
Einstein@Home will be shutdown for a few hours starting at 08:00 on Jun 16 UTC: we are adding a new file server.

June 15, 2006
Einstein@Home has begun processing of a small number of test workunits using data from the LIGO S5 science run. This is the first LIGO data collected at the instrument's design sensitivity. We'll post more information in the 'Cruncher's corner' message board area as we begin to create more of these workunits.

June 12, 2006
Einstein@Home will be shutdown for a few hours starting at 16:30 on Jun 12. There are repairs being made to the AC units and power for the room.

June 7, 2006
Einstein@Home is back online. The problems we had tonight were due to a breaker popping in the database server UPS . Thank you for your patience.

June 7, 2006
Einstein@Home is currently down due to the database server failing. We are working to bring the database server back online as soon as possible.

June 2, 2006
We had another unplanned outage today (approximately one hour) because power was disconnected from our UPS systems for too long. The project is back up and running normally.

June 1, 2006
Thank you for your patience: Einstein@Home is now running normally again. Over the weekend some additional construction/repair work will be done. This work has been planned so as not to interfere with the project. However if something does go wrong we may be 'off the air' again, at least briefly. We will try hard to prevent this from happening.

May 31, 2006
Einstein@Home is back up and running. Because of the backlog of work that has been completed by YOUR computers in the past few days, our systems may be somewhat slow at uploading this completed work and handing out new work. So please be patient if it takes a bit of time before your computers are busy crunching away! Note: experience shows that recovery from this type of 'hard' failure can take some time; there may be new problems that appear, which may require rapid shut-down and additional corrective action at our end. But we will try hard to avoid this if possible.

May 31, 2006
We are making good progress in restarting the project. Now that the web pages are up, we will first enable file uploads and then enable the scheduler. It may be some hours before we are again handing out new work and everything is functioning normally. We'll post further reports here when we have more news.

May 31, 2006
The Einstein@Home project went off-line because of an air-conditioning failure on May 28. We are working to get the project back up and running and hope to have it fully functional in the next day or two.

May 23, 2006
Bruce Allen will give a public seminar about Einstein@Home at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' on Thursday May 25 at 16:30.

May 11, 2006
The Einstein@Home validator ran into an unknown problem at 07:21 UTC May 11 and started marking all results as 'validate error' until the validator was restarted at about 15:00 UTC May 11. It is our intent to grant the canonical credit to all results marked as 'validate error' during that period. This may take some time as we need to wait until a canonical result is found for each workunit. So this credit will be awarded gradually over the coming few days.

April 23, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down for a couple hours today due to a hardware failure in the primary database server. The failure occurred some time after 18:00 UTC on April 23 and the project was running again by 20:30 UTC. All harddisks have been moved into the backup database server and no data was lost.

April 21, 2006
The Einstein@Home project will be be shutdown for periods of maintenance over the next 24 hours.

April 15, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down again for several hours today due to a loss of power to the E@H servers. The problem started at 01:05 UTC on April 15th. The current situation is that there is a faulty 150A breaker for server room where E@H is located. We are now only running the most essential servers in order to decrease the load until the breaker can be replaced.

April 13, 2006
The Einstein@Home project was down for several hours today due to a loss of power to the room were the E@H servers are located. The problem started at 02:09 UTC on April 13th.

April 10, 2006
The database server went down at 16:01 April 10 UTC and resulted in various problems for the project over the next three hours. All parts of the Einstein@Home project appear to be operating properly now.

March 28, 2006
The project server was shutdown for a few hours today while we fixed a server bottleneck. The project is running again but may be a bit slow for the next day while working though the backlog.

March 15, 2006
Einstein@Home will briefly be taken offline while changes are made to the database server. The maintenance will start at 05:00 UTC March 15 and will last approximately 2 hours.

March 5, 2006
The addition of 16GB of memory to the database server caused an unexpected problem. It exposed a bug in the 3ware Linux disk controller driver which took many hours to identify and understand. The project was back up and running soon after 13:00 UTC today. We do not anticipate any further issues, and apologize to project participants for the unanticipated downtime. On the positive side, the memory upgrade will make the Einstein@Home web pages and project forums snappier and more responsive.

March 5, 2006
Einstein@Home will briefly be taken offline while memory is being added to the database server. The maintenance will start at March 5 01:00 UTC and will last approximately 2 hours.

February 18, 2006
There was a disk failure in the Einstein@Home project server on February 17 at 20:47:08 UTC which was handled correctly by the RAID controller hardware but not by the OS driver, resulting in an unwritable file system. This was fixed by David Hammer within about five hours. During this time, file uploads and downloads were not possible. About two hours after the disk was replaced and the file systems was repaired, a bit of fussing was also needed to restart work unit generation and the scheduler. The project is now up and running again. There was no data loss or corruption and we do not expect any further issues. Note that this was our first project downtime in approximately 8 months.

February 7, 2006
Participants returning to Einstein@Home: welcome back!
If you lost your password, please go to the get account key page and have your key emailed to you. Use this account key to log into your home page to change your password.

February 7, 2006
Due to a scripting error, some Einstein@Home users received an email message addressed to 'ballen' with a lengthy (repeated) 'how to opt-out of future emails' tail at the end. We apologize for this.

January 27, 2006
The Einstein@Home project now has more than 100,000 users with computing credit. But at the present rate, our current S4 search will take more than 200 days to complete, so please ask your friends and colleagues to sign up!

January 14, 2006
Einstein@Home is now distributing an experimental application for Solaris (on SPARC). This has no graphics yet, but we hope to have a graphical version ready soon. Please report problems or success on this message board thread.

January 2, 2006
A report on the final results of the Einstein@Home S3 search may be found in a talk given by Bruce Allen on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration at the 10th annual Gravitational Wave Data Analysis Workshop.

December 25, 2005
The new "Albert" search application seems to be working very well, so we are beginning to distribute thousands of "Albert" workunits. For more information, please see the this thread in the message boards. Happy holidays!!

December 23, 2005
After almost five months of development and private testing, Einstein@Home will begin public testing and distribution of a new search application called "Albert". This is an improved and more sensitive version of the previous search code. Initially we will send out only a few hundred workunits for this new search, but if these are successful, we will begin broader distribution of these new workunits over the coming few days. If unexpected problems arise, please be patient, and look in the Problems and Bug Reports message board for additional information.

November 28, 2005
The database upgrade was successful and took about one hour.

November 27, 2005
Einstein@Home will be shutdown at 10:00 UTC on Sunday Nov 27 and should be back on within three hours. This maintenance time will be used to add larger disks to the database server. The extra space will be used to store backups and future results.

October 7, 2005
The Einstein@Home webapges were just upgraded to the latest boinc version.
Please report any problems in the Problems and Bug Reports message board.

October 5, 2005
The Einstein@Home webapges will be upgraded over the next few hours. Please report any problems in the Problems and Bug Reports message board.

September 30, 2005
We are in the process of making some required upgrades to the Einstein@Home web pages and Account management features. These are needed in order to remain consistent with changes taking place in BOINC. Unfortunately for several hours today, this meant that first-time users did not get account info or could not attach to Einstein@Home. Please be patient and try again if you had trouble. We'll try to sort this out soon.

September 11, 2005
We have posted a status report on the results of the Einstein@Home analysis of LIGO S3 data. Please post questions or comments to this Science Message Board thread.

August 14, 2005
There is a new article that has been written (in German) about Einstein@Home by "Astronomie Heute".

August 13, 2005
A new Mac OS X test application (0.12) is available on this page. This should fix the hang/freeze problem of the previous 0.11 test application.

August 7, 2005
Linux users: a new application version (4.81) is now being automatically distributed. This is the same as our previous 0.06 Linux test application. Please keep an eye on your computer's work during the next week or so, and report any problems to the 'Problems and Bug Reports' message board area.

August 3, 2005
A new Mac OS X test application (0.11) is available on this page. This should fix the hang/freeze problem of the previous 0.08 test application.

July 29, 2005
A new Linux test application (0.06) is available on this page. On Pentium-III and above CPUs, this should run substantially faster than the previous Linux application.

July 28, 2005
A new feature has been added to the Einstein@Home scheduler to re-send Workunits that were lost when sent to your computer. Please report experiences with this feature to this message board thread.

July 26, 2005
A new Mac OS X test application (0.08) is available on this page which fixes the suspend/resume bug. We also expect to have a new Linux test application ready soon.

July 21, 2005
A new Mac OS X test application (0.05) is available on this page.

July 20, 2005
We have put into place a new validator that should reduce the number of invalid results by about 10%. If this works as expected we will soon be distributing a new version of the Mac OS X application which includes a working screensaver and graphics. Also, the next time your BOINC client contacts the Einstein@Home project, the BOINC manager will display additional project buttons with helpful links.

June 30, 2005
Einstein@Home will be shutdown for about an hour starting at 00:00 on Fri July 1 UTC. We will be using this time to move some servers and rewire some cabling.

June 28, 2005
A mistake was made in generating some of the S4 workunits. All workunits whose names start with 'h1_' (LOWER CASE!) have been cancelled (though user/hosts/teams will still get credit for any work done). To avoid wasting CPU time, any running 'h1_' (LOWER CASE ONLY!) work can be aborted 'by hand' if desired. Some detail is in this message board thread.

June 27, 2005
We are completing our final S3 analysis jobs. The Einstein@Home server will be down for some brief periods (a few minutes) during the next day, as we start to distribute workunits which use the LIGO S4 data set.

June 21, 2005
The APS (American Physical Society) has setup a page about Einstein@Home. We just added a link to http://einsteinatHome.org/ under the "More Information" information section of main E@H page.

June 20, 2005
Interested users can help us now by testing our "Beta Apps". Instructions for installing them can be found on this page. The current Beta Apps feature a fix for the ATI graphics driver issue (Windows) and working screensaver and fast AltiVec science code (MacOS). .

June 20, 2005
The Einstein@Home server crashed on June 20 at 20:30 UTC. The server was rebooted and everything appears to be working correctly now.

June 09, 2005
The Einstein@Home server crashed again on June 09 at 20:20 UTC. The server was rebooted and everything appears to be working correctly now. This crash was unrelated to the previous crash on May 26 which we now know was the result of a motherboard failure.

May 26, 2005
Einstein@Home has been down for nearly 24 hours due to a server failure. The problems started at 05:40 May 25 UTC and we are still not sure what caused the problem.

May 26, 2005
The planned maintenance for Thursday will be postponed to a later date due to a server failure.

May 23, 2005
The Einstein@Home servers will be shutdown on Thursday May 26 at 15:00 UTC. The servers will be moved into the new Einstein@Home computer cabinet.

May 15, 2005
We have granted credit to a few dozen users/teams/hosts who did computing on workunits that were subsequently cancelled.

May 4, 2005
There was a bug introduced in the forums that prevented people from replying to a thread. The changes have been backed out and the problem has been reported to the BOINC developers.

May 3, 2005
We have finished the first complete analysis of the LIGO S3 data set. Based on this, the data preparation and cleaning process have been modified to remove a number of instrumental artifacts that appeared in the post-processing stage, and a new data set has been prepared. This new data set uses the final S3 time-domain calibration and also includes a number of 'software simulated' fake source signals. After we have completed analysis of this final S3 data set (a few weeks) we will to move on to the new and more sensitive S4 data set.

May 1, 2005
A bug-fix in the Einstein@Home scheduler about 20 hours ago introduced another bug which prevented the scheduler from responding properly in many cases. This has been fixed.

April 30, 2005
A new Einstein@Home data mirror is now in place at the University of Glasgow. Einstein@Home users in the UK will use this as their primary data download site.

April 21, 2005
The Einstein@Home server will be shutdown for maintenance at 16:00 UTC Fri Apr 22th. At this time we will be upgrading our database server hardware. After the upgrade is complete there will be some performance improvements. For example forum webpages will load faster.

April 10, 2005
The Einstein@Home server crashed at 20:33 UTC Apr 10th. We are currently trying to fix a few problems that resulted from the crash.

April 7, 2005
During the next few days we will finish the first round of S3 analysis and begin a second round. As we finish up the first round of S3 analysis, users may find that they are getting a new data file with each workunit; users with modem connections may want to suspend Einstein@Home for a few days to avoid multiple long downloads. Note that there may also be some instability in a few days as we shift to new workunits.

April 6, 2005
The Einstein@Home server will be shutdown on Fri Apr 8 19:00 UTC for approximately one hour for maintenance.

April 6, 2005
A new version of the validator (Teviet Creighton) is now in use. This should reduce the numbers of results which are incorrectly marked as 'invalid'.

March 18, 2005
A data download mirror is now being hosted by the MIT LSC group. Einstein@Home users in the US Eastern Time Zone will also use this mirror.

March 14, 2005
A data download mirror is now being hosted by the PSU LSC group. Einstein@Home users in the US Eastern Time Zone will now try to get data from this mirror first.

March 8, 2005
We had a short outage today that resulted from the kernel running out of memory and killing the database. You may have noticed problems connecting to the scheduler or the forums.

March 5, 2005
In the two weeks since our public launch, Einstein@Home has gone from about 6,000 users (with credit) to over 20,000, and is currently adding users at the rate of about 1,000/day. Apart from one 30-minute crash, the project server has been operating stably; we estimate that it has the capacity to handle about ten times the current number of users, hosts and workunits.

Feb 26, 2005
The scheduler is running again and we hope that we have fixed the last of the problems that resulted from the crash.

Feb 26, 2005
The Einstein@Home server crashed at 09:30 Feb 26 UTC. We still do not know what caused the problem. We are still working on recovering from the crash so the scheduler will not be running for a few hours. You should report any problems that you may be having as a result of the crash in the "Problems and Bug Reports" message board.

Feb 24, 2005
Some users did not receive their account keys. We recently changed the setup of our email system to fix this. If you did not receive your account key please go to the Get account key page. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Feb 23, 2005
A small bug in the validator has been fixed. This should reduce the number of correct results that were being marked as invalid. Thanks to Steffen Grunewald for spotting and fixing this.

Feb 19, 2005
Einstein@Home was officially launched this morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Washington, DC, USA.

Feb 14, 2005
For testing purposes, in anticipation of our public launch, we will be enabling account creation for some unannounced periods this week. If you are interested in joining Einstein@Home, please try the Create Account link.

Feb 14, 2005
A bug in the validator caused it to crash (but didn't cause any results to be incorrectly validated). The problem has been located and should be fixed in a few hours.

Feb 13, 2005
We have completed the scheduled maintenance. Everything went according to plan.

Feb 13, 2005
We have enabled the BOINC configuration option 'enforce_delay_bound'. This prevents work from being sent to your machine if BOINC determines that your machine could not finish the work before the deadline. This may affect users with very slow machines, or users attached to multiple BOINC projects, whose Einstein@Home resource share is small.

Feb 12, 2005
We are planning to shutdown the Einstein@Home server for approximately 1 hour starting at 23:00 UTC on Sunday the 13th. We will update the mysql database software and the kernel.

Feb 11, 2005
Some additional 'paranoia checks' added into the 4.75-4.77 applications identified an important bug in the central LALDemod() routine of the analysis code. (PoorBoy: your lost workunits were not in vain!). The maximum velocity of our detector (as the earth orbits the sun and rotates on its axis) is about 1% larger than the code allowed for, so for certain data sets and sky directions, a frequency array was one bin smaller than required. This has been fixed, and new applications (4.78, 4.79, 4.80) are now being distributed.

Feb 8, 2005
New applications are now available for Windows (4.75) Linux (4.76) and Mac (4.77). These should resolve the 'hanging workunit' problems described below. They also incorporate several other fixes and improvements. NOTE: if you start to experience 'download' related errors, be SURE to upgrade your (public) BOINC core client to version 4.19 or your (experimental) BOINC core client to version 4.59 or greater..

Feb 7, 2005
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration Calibration Team has released the final (v3) calibration information for the S3 data run. In the next several days we will be replacing our current search data set (which uses the v2 calibration) with the v3 version.

Feb 2, 2005
A BOINC bug in the scheduler meant that for a period of about 10 hours users got server messages saying 'low' and 'high' (rather than the actual message)! This has been fixed.

Feb 1, 2005
We have started using a mirrored download server at the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Golm bei Potsdam, near Berlin, Germany. Hosts whose timezone offset from UTC is closer to UWM (UTC-7 hours) will continue to get data and executables from UWM. Those hosts whose offset from UTC is closer to the AEI (UTC+1 hour) will get data and executables from AEI. This should give faster and more reliable downloads for everyone. Note that if a download fails from the first server, the alternate will also be tried. Please report any problems or strange behavior to the message boards.

Jan 31, 2005
We are now testing the new 'coincidence' routine. This has reduced the run time of the coincidence step in the worst-case tests from about six hours to four minutes, and memory use by a significant factor. If all goes well, new applications should be available this week. We are also now testing a modified scheduler that (1) provides better feedback messages to hosts that are not getting work because they lack disk space, and (2) deletes data files from hosts when they run short of disk space.

Jan 26, 2005
Thanks in part to user feedback and detective work by Bernd Machenschalk and others we have located and are now fixing a significant bug in our search code. The search code works in three stages. The first two stages search instrument data from two different periods of time. The third stage searches for consistency (coincidence) in the output from these two time periods. The bug is in this final third stage. For a few of the input data sets, this third coincidence step (which should take only a minute or so) takes much longer because the computation time increases from N log N to order N-squared. The results are still correct but the computation can last for hours. Xavier Siemens is rewriting this routine to guarantee N log N behavior; we hope to have a revised application ready for testing within a few days.

Jan 26. 2005
Version 4.19 of the BOINC client has been released. Rom has made this release the default boinc client and not just a development version. Please upgrade to 4.19 as soon as possible.

Jan 25. 2005
Version 4.18 of the BOINC client has been released. The most important bug that was fixed is. 
    - When the server requests a delay, make sure we do not overwrite           
        the min_rpc_time, which has already been set to the proper              
        delay time.
This was a bug that was reported by Bruce.
Please upgrade to 4.18 as soon as possible.

Jan 24. 2005
Version 4.17 of the BOINC client has been released. Here is what Rom said in the release notes. 
        We have released what we believe is going to be a build good enough
for public release.

        Let us know if there is anything wrong, if not, we'll be releasing
soon.

----- Rom
Please upgrade to 4.17 as soon as possible.

Jan 20. 2005
The BOINC developers have once again released a new version of the client (4.16) that fixes two bugs. Here is what Rom said in the release notes. 
This release contains two fixes:

      - don't unsuspend tasks before restarting them
      - allow large command lines (backpatched from 4.5x)

----- Rom
Please upgrade to 4.16 as soon as possible.

Jan 20, 2005
We are testing the new "monolithic fast validator", which is needed for us to accomodate much larger numbers of users. Our apologies: a bug in this caused a handful of successful and correct results to be marked as "invalid".

Jan 18. 2005
The BOINC developers have released a new version of the client (4.15) that fixes a bug that caused some lost work for CPDN users when they were upgrading the client. Please upgrade to 4.15 as soon as possible.

Jan 18. 2005
We have cancelled the remaining "old scheduler" workunits, and started testing the new locality scheduler. This should send work to hosts that already have the correct data input files, greatly reducing the download demands on host computers and the Einstein@Home server.

Jan 17, 2005
As explained in the news item from Jan 13, below, the BOINC 4.13 core client contained a serious bug that has now been fixed. Einstein@Home users: please upgrade to the BOINC 4.14 core client, which can be found halfway down this page. PLEASE UPGRADE THE BOINC CORE CLIENT TO VERSION 4.14. THIS WILL BECOME MANDATORY FOR EINSTEIN@HOME WITHIN A SHORT TIME.

Jan 14, 2005
To prepare for the upgrade of our scheduler, we are not providing new work for the next day or two. We are taking this measure to try and minimize the amount of lost credit and to make the transition to the new scheduler as smooth as possible.

Jan 13, 2005
IMPORTANT NEWS: David Anderson, the creator of BOINC, has found and fixed a serious bug in the BOINC 'core client'. This causes failure of a job if the download of any of its input files fails (the correct behavior is to retry and complete the download, then run the job). Moreover, any other job that used the same files would also fail. A fixed core client should be available soon. This should make Einstein@Home work much better and eliminate the main source of job failure

Jan 12, 2005
In the next several days we are going to shift from using the current BOINC scheduler to a new BOINC 'locality' scheduler. This will have some important benefits. In particular, it will ensure that host computers get lots of work for the (large) data files that they have already downloaded, instead of being required to download a new large data file for each new item of work. It will also remove these large data files from the host computers when they are no longer needed. Unfortunately the new scheduler is not compatible with the test workunits currently in progress on many hosts. Testers, please note that for this reason, we will be forced to cancel a number of workunits currently in progress, when we shift to the new scheduler.

Jan 4, 2005
In anticipation of 'going public' Einstein@Home is now running on the new server hardware. We need to complete and test (hopefully) one final round of application revisions before this happens. Hopefully this will eliminate the remaining problems with SIGABORT failures in the Linux application and similar problems (and a useless docked window) in the Macintosh application.

Jan 3, 2005
Important News!
The Einstein@Home server will be SHUT DOWN a ~9:30 UTC on WED JAN 4 so we can upgrade to new hardware

Dec 31, 2004
HAPPY NEW YEAR! We are starting to distribute our final test workunits, named "pt11". These take substantially longer than our previous test workunits. We expect to have our new server hardware in place within a few days, for out public launch. To all of our testers, thank you for making this possible, and please be patient if things don't work quite right for the next few days.

Dec 27, 2004
Note that the Einstein@Home server will be up and down and possibly unstable during the coming week, as we install new hardware and prepare to go public. Also, we will soon start providing new workunits that take 12 times as long to execute as the current test workunits.

Dec 27, 2004
New Windows, Linux and Mac applications are available. All compress upload data to save bandwidth. Mac: resume-bug fixed. Linux: Should work correctly on both graphics and non-graphics capable machines; fixed bug that caused user-specified checkpoint interval to be ignored.

Dec 10, 2004
New Windows application is available. This fixes the problem that the application was checkpointing (writing to disk) more often than was requested by the user's preferences.

Dec 2, 2004
New Mac OSX application is available. In the next few days we'll distribute a small tool to pop open the screensaver graphics window for this. Note that this is our first app version to compress its upload files (typical compression factor > 3). The next Linux and Windows apps will also do this.

Dec 1, 2004
We have begun an ongoing process of purging the workunit/result database of completed workunits and results. This makes the 'back end' of Einstein@Home much faster, but it means that the lists of results and workunits shown under 'Your account' won't list workunits that have been completed, since these are purged from the database.

Nov 26, 2004
New Mac OSX executable is now being tested. It is a factor of 2.5 faster than the previous version, and it displays the screensaver graphics!

Nov 23, 2004
New Windows executable (4.46) fixes problem with distorted search point marker. New Linux/Mac OSX executables coming soon.

Nov 21, 2004
A bug in BOINC, and a mistake in our build process, caused us to post broken Windows and Linux executables this weekend. We have now posted repaired and faster Linux (4.43) and Windows (4.44) executables.

November 19, 2004
Cross Project ID's should now work (thanks, Jens!)


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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant NSF-0200852 and by the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or the MPG.

Copyright © 2009 Bruce Allen for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration