At some point into my 5th month of mining for Gridcoin, I got burnt out. For too long had I been spending endless night-time hours optimising my project choices; perfecting my resource share distribution; keeping up with all project news to predict work unit queue depletion... all to get the highest magnitude possible and maximise my mint. It was not why I joined Gridcoin, and I was no longer enjoying it.
The reason I first came to love this coin is because it harnesses the power of crypto currency compute in a way no other coin does. That spoke to me on a personal level, often having found myself struggling to complete my own research due to a lack of compute resources. One night, when discussing this burnout with @vortac (who first brought me into the community), I decided to simply stop giving a toss about magnitude. I picked the project that seemed the coolest, and threw most of my compute behind that because I wanted to.
So began my hunt for a pulsar with Einstein@home.
To give a little background on the topic, neutron stars are what remains after a star has gone supernova. This leaves behind an incredibly dense mass of exotic matter in the tens of kilometers in diameter. Despite this, these neutron stars can weight a million times more than Earth does.
As a result of the strong magnetic fields and the high rotational velocity of these neutron stars, they send out beams of gamma rays in a way not dissimilar to a cosmic lighthouse. Sometimes, there beams may sweep across the Earth, making the neutron star visible as a pulsating gamma ray source - this is a pulsar. One of the two primary aims of Einstein@home is to detect these pulsars, which takes an enormous amount of compute for signal analysis. Below you can see the 13 most recent pulsars discovered by the project, as viewed looking into the plane of the galactic core.
It has been just under a month since I made the switch to hunt pulsars, and I have in the past hour crossed the 20 million RAC threshold. I consider this a huge achievement, as when I set out on this journey the (playful) aim was to out-compete the German ATLAS supercluster, which had been hitting around 19 million RAC.
For a brief moment, I had a higher throughput than ATLAS, before they threw everything up a gear and shot back up to position 1. It will come as no surprise that the ATLAS cluster alone is responsible for the discovery of 3 unique pulsars already.
I will continue the pulsar hunt, as I thoroughly enjoy mining Gridcoin again. Every day I come into the lab and am keen to see how much of the sky my machines have scanned (Einstein@home keeps fantastic project completion stats). In the end isn't this what we are all about? Making a difference to humanity and having a blast doing it.
Whether you are helping find the next drug, listening for ET, or mapping the cosmos, it's pretty cool to know that when all the money business is said and done you have made a tangible difference.
P.S. for those of you who have been asking - you will not be competing against me for the 10,000 GRC GPUGrid rain from @vortac. My cluster is far too busy scanning the stars.
Content Credit:
Pulsar Map, Einstein@home
'I picked the project that seemed the coolest, and threw most of my compute behind that because I wanted to.' the secret to a long and happy BOINC and Gridcoin relationship :)
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Oh man, you know it!
Thanks again for your work on the new rain script. I'm going to look over it later.
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Sure, my pleasure, Im a novice so check it over carefully.
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Einstein@home really goes at great lengths to reward their crunchers. They carefully monitor their whole process to single out those workunits which yielded a discovery (not always an easy task in computational science when you handle loads of data). Then you get an e-mail from their top-scientist, Prof. Bruce Allen. Then you receive a framed discovery certificate with a personal letter of appreciation from the same. Then they publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal (a very prestigious scientific publication) where they mention you as one of the volunteers who made the discovery possible.
Other BOINC projects are making a big mistake in not implementing some of those perks. I know that it's not always possible to single out "the discovery workunit" but I am sure they could do better than providing no perks at all. The cost of such things is really minuscule, and their marketing potential (so to speak) is huge, probably larger than any reward you can realistically get with Gridcoin or any other crypto.
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Good points. Volunteer crunchers need more feedback, an opportunity to taste discoveries. It is very important, as without positive feedback people easily burn out.
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I'm running mostly the cancer related projects since that disease caused my family and acquaintances much grief the past years.
Mostly rosetta and WCG offers those and are compatible with phones so I'm mostly running those. I know if you want the min maxing there are better options available but I don't care one bit.
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I am very sorry to hear that - it's a terrible disease.
Fully with you on not bothering with min-maxing. As we could have probably expected, on the whole the 'least efficient' projects to run are the ones that are the most useful to humanity, because more crunchers want to run them.
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That's the way to go. I initially crunched Einstein because my students liked seeing the very cool screensaver! I'll cop to some min-maxing as I've got a cadre of HD7950s so Milkyway is optimal, but then I complete the 'astro' by working for Pogs on the CPUs and Einstein when the Milkyway runs out of WUs.
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