cecht
Member since:
07 March 2018
Country:
United States
BOINC ID:
990821
Background
I'm a retired plant geneticist whose daughter got her undergrad degree in physics because she was interested in astrophysics. She ended up in the film industry in LA, however, so I'm carrying on with the astrophysics part. Ha!
It started when I read about E@H in Science magazine - or was it Nature?; I can't remember. I had an unused laptop sitting at home and so put the old thing to work. Then I recruited a couple PCs at the office, then I bought an old gaming PC on eBay, upgraded it's graphics card, bought a second GPU, and, well, you know how it goes. Since retiring, I've built my first PC, bought two more GPUs for crunching, and got hooked on Linux/Ubuntu. This is fun stuff!
Check out a Python3 program I wrote to monitor BOINC task completion rates and time metrics. There are Terminal and GUI versions that run on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Standalone implementations (no Python needed) are available for Windows and MacOS. It's all on my GitHub page: https://github.com/csecht/CountBOINCtasks.
Opinion
Einstein@Home is a noble endeavor and I get a kick out of being a part of it. I'm impressed by the pure science aspects of E@H, but even more impressed by the community of volunteers who are helpful, smart, and dedicated. Yes, it's all about the science, but I must admit that I watch my BOINC credits and periodically check my ranking against other users.