Breakthrough in Grid Computing: Radio Pulsar Discovered Using D-Grid Clusters

In July, a radio pulsar was discovered in data recorded at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico by means of the Einstein@Home project. This project is based on distributed computing. About 250,000 voluntary participants from 192 countries contribute to Einstein@Home using their home or office computers. In addition to these private PCs, computations are performed on the compute resources of the German Grid infrastructure D-Grid. The analysis carried out on the D-Grid infrastructure formed the largest contribution to the worldwide analysis. The data analysis of Einstein@Home is the most successful scientific application of D-Grid to date.

The D-Grid compute resources comprise clusters located at about 30 sites with approximately 30,000 CPU cores and 5 PByte of memory. One of the largest clusters in this infrastructure is the JUGGLE cluster at JSC. The main user community on JUGGLE is the D-Grid community "AstroGrid-D", which adapted the Einstein@Home analysis software to Grid usage.

(Contact: Dr. Thomas Fieseler, ext. 1602)

from JSC News No. 190, November 2010