Belmont’s Physics Department has recently begun re-purposing the idle time on McWhorter lab desktop computers, through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), for the Einstein@Home research project. After installing BOINC on these computer, researchers can connect to a number of research projects, making it possible to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.
Einstein@Home searches for weak astrophysical signals from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite. This will put Belmont in the top 1% of BOINC users in the world.
