Why Dont You Blog?

It looks like the Einstein@Home servers are down again. This seems to happen once or twice a month and can last for anything up to a few days.

Looking over the BOINC message log, it appears that the servers may have been kaput since around 0430Z today. Over the last few days there have been occasional problems when my client has tried to connect and download new work units, but this looks like a big one.

At the time of writing, the Server Status page is non-existant and the main project page isn’t coming up (It may have made sense for the Einstein@Home team to have put these on different servers…). The forums, which I thought were on different servers, also seem to be off line at this time.

Oh well. Might as well turn it off then.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Five days ago I talked about the odd statistics which were showing up in my BOINC client for Einstein@Home. Sadly in the intervening five days, nothing has become any clearer.

Now, the BOINC client has been running constantly (with the exception of one 9 hour period) for the last five days, yet the increase seems minimal and the average is plummeting like a stone. Looking at the client stats page there are still 82 work units “pending” credit (at around 53.4 credits per unit) so eventually this should change.

Even so, I am still not sure how the two sets of numbers compare to each other. I cant work out how the averages are calculated at all. Any comments welcome.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

I am far from an expert on these subjects, but it covers something which has been intriguing me over the last few days. The Einstein@HOME program is described as follows:

Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS)and by a number of international organizations.

(A bit like Seti@Home but that seems to have lost some popularity of late)

Now this is a nice bit of software which runs from something called the BOINC manager, where you can get to view your current work unit, see stats, visit the forums etc.

The question I have, is about the “user statistics” it shows. As you can see in the screen shots, there is choice of “user total” or “user average” and to me, the two don’t seem to match up. I am led to believe the average is “recent average” rather than a simple (total / days) type. But even so, it seems odd - especially as I have had the software running almost constantly for little or no return in the way of work units.

Any feedback or commentary welcome. Given the steady climb shown by the total figures, the mountain-like averages seem somewhat… odd.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]