Einstein At Home FACT SHEET --------------------------- Einstein@Home (E@H) was launched on February 19th, 2005 at the AAAS meeting in Washington. It was one of the cornerstone projects of the World Year of Physics 2005 (called the 'Einstein Jahr' in Germany). Einstein@Home was developed at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany. It is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Gesellschaft. The software for E@H is built using the BOINC software toolkit from Berkeley. E@H runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers and also does computation on NVIDIA graphics cards. E@H has been searching data from Arecibo Observatory since 24 March 2009. More than 262,000 E@H volunteers have 'computing credits': their work has been completed and validated. There are E@H volunteers from every one of the 192 countries recognized by the UN http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/org1469.doc.htm E@H has its main server hardware at U. of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee and at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover. In the week ending 6 August 2010, more than 108,000 different volunteers computers downloaded work from the Einstein@Home servers. These machines are active about 35% of the time and contribute more than 6 million CPU-hours of work each week. MANY interesting statistics about E@H can be found at this 'BOINC statistics' website: http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=einstein The top countries represented are (decreasing number of E@H volunteers): USA, Germany, UK, France, Canada, Italy, Poland, Spain, Australia, Czech Republic, China, Netherlands, Japan. http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=einstein&view=countries The electrical power donated by E@H volunteers can be estimated as follows. A typical computer uses ~150 Watts. Thus E@H volunteers are contributing 150 Watts x 108,000 x 0.35 = 5 Megawatts of electrical power, 24 x 7. This would cost, in the USA, about $500 USD/hour, or more than $4 Million/year. In Europe, electrical power costs about three times as much. E@H has so far searched 33,000 'beams' (separate observations) from Arecibo Observatory http://einstein-dl.aei.uni-hannover.de/EinsteinAtHome/ABP/. This is 132 Terabytes (132,000 Gigabytes) of radio data. E@H is currently working through a PALFA 'data backlog' three times faster than new data is being acquired. Bruce Allen bruce.allen@aei.mpg.de