Donate your computer to science

Oh yeah. Here's a Grid computing project I can sink my teeth into. Kip Thorne, a physicist at CalTech, came up with a machine that detects gravity waves. A gravity wave is a disturbance in the space-time continuum caused by large gravitational events. One such persistent gravitational distrubance is an asymmetrical "neutron star" (whether or not it's really a neutron star, or a quark star, or...). As these bad boys rotate (bad boys, in that they're the mass of the sun shoved down into an object the size of a medium city - 10 or 11 km) they should radiate gravity waves. The objects are called GWENS - Gravity Wave Emitting Neturon Stars. The detectors use very long tunnels - 4 km - at right angles and finely-tuned lasers to detect gravity waves. These detectors, one in Washington and one in Louisiana, are called LIGO, for laser interferometer gravitywave observatory.

Unfortunately, they generate huge amounts of data. Sifting through that data takes a lot of time. So, they've created a grid computing project called Einstein@home to search for candidate objects. You can join up, and use the spare compute cycles on your computers, to help process these data. Go off to the Einstein@home home page, right now, and read up on it.