Gridcoin GPU mining (4): Searching for Gravitational Waves

Welcome to the fourth installment of Gridcoin GPU mining series! In previous articles, we have covered Gridcoin GPU mining in general, PrimeGrid (and the discovery of new prime-numbers) and MilkyWay@home (with differences between single and double precision floating point operations).

Now one might ask: Why so many articles? Can’t you describe your hashing algo in few sentences and be done with it?

Well, that’s exactly the point – there is no hashing algorithm and there is no repetitive Proof-of-Work hashing with Gridcoin. Gridcoin is mined through 28 different BOINC projects, performing various scientific computations, from astrophysics to biomedicine, greatly varying in scope (mapping the galaxy or studying protein folding at molecular level), preferred hardware (CPU, GPU, AMD, Intel, Nvidia) and type of calculations (integer, FP32, FP64).

So most definitely, there is a lot of material for plenty of articles on the topic of Gridcoin mining. In fact, there is so much of it, it’s certainly beyond my knowledge and experience to write comprehensively about so many different scientific and computing endeavors. Not to mention that new BOINC projects are appearing all the time, as computational science is expanding rapidly to all fields of human knowledge and all types of scientific research (“the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws”). But I’ll do what I can, so in this article, I present you one of the most popular and fascinating BOINCprojects: Einstein@home.

The project

Einstein@home was released back in 2005. as one of the earliest BOINC projects, backed and supported by many scientific institutions and organizations across the world. It was developed by LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and Max Planck Society (MPG) and is hosted by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, Germany). Albert Einstein Institute is the largest research institute in the world specializing in general relativity and in this context, the name of their project is obviously aptly chosen, capturing the public attention (a necessity if you want to run a massively distributed computing project) and covering the scientific aspects at the same time. Einstein@home is also supported by the American Physical Society (APS), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and a number of international organizations.

NSF is an independent U.S. government agency responsible for promoting science and engineering through research programs and education projects. With an annual budget of $7 billion, many scientific projects are funded through NSF (and many popular BOINC projects too).

Of course, Einstein@home is also whitelisted by Gridcoin, meaning that crunching for Einstein@home also earns you Gridcoins (i.e. mining through computational science). The project is protected by SSL, very stable, with very little down time and with a vast supply of workunits. Over 500 000 BOINC volunteers have run or are running Einstein@home on their computers. Without any doubt, Einstein@home is one of the most renowned and established BOINC projects ever.