本帖最后由 Stella 于 2013-9-1 10:48 编辑
Pulsar searches with public participation
Each week, 50,000 volunteers from around the world “donate” idle compute cycles on their 200,000 home and office PCs to Einstein@Home. Together they combine to yield a sustained computing power of around 860 teraFLOPs per second. This places Einstein@Home on par with the world's fastest supercomputers. The analysis of the archival Parkes data was completed in eight months, while the same task would have taken a single CPU core more than 17,000 years.
公众可参与的脉冲星搜索活动
每周,在世界范围内均有5万余名志愿者将属于他们的20余万台家用电脑或企业电脑的闲置计算能力“捐献”给Einstein@Home项目。这些电脑能够持续的提供每秒约860TeraFLOPS的计算能力。这使得Einstein@Home能够在世界范围内的超级计算机当中跻身前列。分析这些来自帕克斯的归档资料共耗时8个月。而在仅使用一个cpu核心的情况下完成该工作需至少17000年。
The Einstein@Home project comes with a screensaver that displays information about the processing on the volunteer's computer. The screensaver shows the rotating celestial sphere with the brightest stars and their constellations. Magenta and red points are known pulsars and supernova remnants, respectively, which are concentrated along the plane of the Milky Way. The orange crosshair shows the sky position currently being analysed. Additional processing information and computation details are shown in the corners of the screen. Copyright: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/O. Bock
Einstein@Home项目可以通过一个自带的屏保程序显示计算机目前的处理进程。该屏保可以显示旋转的天球,星座及其中的亮星。紫红色与红色分别代表着已知的脉冲星与超新星遗迹。他们均分布在银河系平面上。桔黄色的十字丝显示的是现在正在被分析的天区。其他的处理信息以及计算详情则显示于屏幕的四角。 版权:马克斯普朗克引力物理研究所/O.Bock
Raw computing power was not the only important factor to discover the two dozen new pulsars. The development of new post-processing methods proved to be just as crucial. The recorded data often contain pulsar-like, man-made interference signals. The astronomers employed new methods that allowed them to discover pulsars previously masked by the presence of these interference signals.
原始计算能力并非是发现这24颗新脉冲星的唯一功臣。新开发的后期处理技术起到了决定性的作用。记录下的数据中往往包含了类似脉冲星(信号)的人为干扰信号。新的技术使得天文学家们能够发现原本被掩盖在这些干扰信号下的脉冲星。
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