Cosmology@Home units processed on Athlon XP 2600+ with max speed about 1 WU / 5 hours (with PC3200 RAM).

Correction: actually two hosts. One - my home Athlon, and P4 that works too seldom.

Started way back with SETI Classic, moved to SETI@home, Rosetta and Milkyway.
Found Cosmology@home rather \"by accident\" on the BOINC webpage, and decided to give it a try.
And you know what ? - It suits me very well! Your project combines IMO the essential questions ( and maybe answers? ) of mankind.
Could well be that I shut down SETI, and contribute my cpu cycles to your project.

Regards
Kurt

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I am interested in all things astronomy as well as physics. Right now, I am currently crunching four BOINC projects which are Cosmology, Einstein, LHC and MilkyWay. I do not have any favorites. All of them are equally important because they contribute to the advancement of astronomy and physics.

In particular, this project has a great website and the communication factor is excellent! I am looking forward to greater and bigger things as this project goes into production later this year.

By the way, there are two more astronomy BOINC projects that are expected to become available sometime this year in which I eagerly anticipate joining!

From age 11, when I was first inspired by the science essays and books of Isaac Asimov, I have been fascinated with astronomy and the amazing progress we are making in the field of cosmology. I\'m glad to be a part of this project, and was happy to see that it is now open to all of us who wish to participate.

I recently retired from a nearby university where I spent my career designing, constructing and operating instrumentation apparatus and systems for the physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences labs. Involvement in all those disciplines got into my blood, and it feels good to be able to contribute, at least at the periphery, a little bit more of my efforts to science in general.

Just like many others here, I first began crunching for SETI@home classic years ago. The power of distributed computing was in its infancy then; but now with the flexible BOINC platform finely-tuned, newer D.C. projects like this can go forward quickly.

On my only other post,regarding credits,I mentioned that I was a 60-y-o truck driver. In the mid 70\'s, long before any Gulf war, I used to drive in the middle-east. When there is no light anywhere except what is shining in the sky you tend to notice what\'s up there. And it is BEAUTIFUL.
I have also spent a lot of my working life on night trunk , between Scotland and England, over the mountains in winter.
Visibility about 150 million light years. And it is BEAUTIFUL
Why I am most surprising is because I have literally stripped down a deisel engine AND repaired it in the desert,replaced blown tyres,[no tyre service call-out there] and can drive a 16 speed gear box,but,at my age,have to hire a three year old to programme my V.C.R.

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I\'ve just joined and was interested to see how many others also have an astronomical predeliction (Cosmology@home, milkyway@home and seti@home). I am definitely not a tech geek (though I am male, and so love technology and gadgets). I work as a GP - a family physician - in a small village in the Blue Moutains of Australia where the sky is stunning (though Sydney, more than 100km away, is creating an ever worsening light pollution effect)

My professional work is obviously medical and my personal interests are psychology, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, physics and... astronomy. Oh, and chess! The deep and meaningful stuff I guess. The reason I haven\'t signed up to any biomedical projects is that there is such a strong profit motive driving research into protein folding etc that I don\'t think they need my processor for free to help them make their next billion dollars (though of course I welcome the advancements in medica treatments that might arise). I want to help fundamental science that is \"pure\" in the sense of uncontaminated by profit motivations.

I am also fascinated by the whole premise of distributed computing projects and the altruistic impulses that lead people to sign up, when they receive nothing back in return except \"valueless\" credits. (In fact the reason I logged on to the forum tonight was to see what this whole credit business was and how it worked). I think the insights of various evolutionary psychologists might be pertinent to discussions of how to get more people to participate. Community is I believe crucial, and so is the token \"payment\" that we receive in the form of credits. The missing incentive from an EP point of view is an audience of females for us to flaunt our credits to!

I look forward to getting to know some of your thoughts and joining with you in contributing to theis worthwhile scientific exercise.

BOINC addict what can I say. Some people have other vices, mine is attempting to build that biggest baddest crunching machine on 4 or 8 wheels.

I have always wondered about what is out there, and have been a long time fan of sci-fi.
Some would call me a geek, but I am really just a guy. Real Estate investor, and finance guy. I work with numbers each and every day, and like the big ones. And what bigger numbers can you have but those in our Cosmos.

Carl Sagan is my Hero!

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why did I join?
well, I read fantasy (Terry Pratchett),
I play fantasy (GuildWars),
I listen to fantasy (Ayreon),
so why not crunch fantasy ;-)

I crunch in the hope that I am helping humanity in some way. I regularly crunch a wide variety of projects.

I am the founder of BOINC@AUSTRALIA and I am very proud to be the founder and a member of such a great Team.

I also like people to visit my WEB CAM in Canada.

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I crunch cosmo because I have an interest in what the universe looks like and what our future may be. I am in construction, not a tech savvy job at all I build computers as a hobby mainly old ones that people throw away for whatever reason. I fix them and give them new life! whenever I find anything that looks usable in the trash I use it, if it has any life left in it ,I believe there is far to much waist out there and I would like to keep it all from cluttering up my beautiful natural world. I am actually negative tech in many ways but I see the good in most of it I just think it is abused to often and waisted on trivial pursuits as well as traded in or trashed before it\'s usable life span is up. at the moment my main interest in distributed computing lies in astronomy.

I will see you in the woods , no really I will SEE YOU ^_^

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I participate to further human knowledge of the universe. NOT!!! I crunch strictly for the credit.

Credit is all I get for the hundreds of dollars a year spent on electricity to power (and cool) my machines. So, when Cosmo drops from the top 3 BOINC projects for awarding credit, you will likely see me leave unless someone volunteers to subsidize my electric bills.

My impetus is that I once tried to become a astrophysicist, but it went too far over my head, and I had to give up on an unrequited love. I did, of course, end up in computers, and turned out to be very good at computer science. I worked as a DBA on Oracle 5 when I started, with good old Cobol. At this point in my life, I\'m a Data Warehouse Architect and always involved in the latest technology in my field. I do spend most of my life on the computer, looking for the latest technological and biological advances. In short, I\'m a girl geek.

I have always wanted to help in anyway I can to assist in understanding the Universe. I was amazed to see mathematics could actual be used to describe the universe, as if math is a key to unlocking to mysteries of the ages. I\'ve been reading science fiction since I was a child, as well. I prayed I would get to travel to other planets and galaxies. Yes, I was once one of those crazies who prayed one of the aliens, if they existed, would pick me up! Of course, I was a trekie, and played D&D. I started with SETI@home as soon as I found out it existed, many years ago.

Now the thing that may make me not fit the stereotype is that I\'m female and I\'m a greenie. I was one of very few women in physics or astronomy when I was taking classes, and there were very few women in computing when I started. Finally, if you\'ve ever been in the Jemez Mountains above Los Alamos, NM, you would never want anything to destroy it, especially lights. The skies are so full of stars, and the milky way is so clear, it is absolutely fabulous. We would watch the meteor showers and could see the satellites as they crossed the sky. Impossibly beautiful!

Kathy Collins
Data Warehouse Architect
Reliant Energy

i, too, crunch for the credit.

that and i hate to see my processing power go to waste. also, in the winter, the heat my processors create heat my apartment (i have stupid electric-only heat. why not put it to use?).

i mainly crunch for medical fields (i occasionally dabble in other areas). previous to this spring, it was in the off and unlikely chance it would speed up a cure for cancer, but, alas it is not necessary any more. i still continue, though.


edit: ps: they need to optimize more projects for GPU accelleration. i\'d dedicate a near-top end GPU to it all winter (and late fall, early spring) if they did so...

Why do I?? Good question that!! Always bee interested in space and all the
leading questions that come to mind. Funny when I asked that to myself
I thought of that line at the start of star trek!! \"The final Frontier\"
hehehe.. But seriously it does pose all kinds of questions that we may or may not answer in our lifetime.

With projects like this and others on Bionic we may get closer that anybody
may think, and may even answer some of them, thats the unknown and the most exciting. And its probably why i participate in not only this but a few
others as well.

Who knows some of us may solve the riddle of, is there any body out there..
So how about getting on top of the problems this project is having and maybe
someone you or I know will find some of the answers that we all seek...

On that Note!!!
Good luck all and have a great time solving these riddles

Cheers
Glenn

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Well, because it is a BOINC project ... :)

As one can see from my signature I have, and do participate in many projects. I prefer production quality projects and so my participation is mainly based on the level of the project and my interest. SO ...

In that I prefer Physics type projects over the biology \"stuff\" (I was going to use another word but remembered my manners), this project like Einstein and Milkyway attract my interest. As someone else said below the pure math projects don\'t trip my trigger well, especially since they seem uninterested in really explaining what they are attempting to do and why it might be important (a very common problem with *MANY* projects).

Other reasons, fairly short tasks, that means that I don\'t lose too much on a failure (nothing worse than pumping 200+ hours into a task and getting a no-validate, or lose it because of a crash ... the whole point of the trickle system was to prevent this kind of thing, but I digress) ...

So, the main reason I am here ... the type of project ...

supporting reasons, reasonably short tasks and decent credit (yes, it is worthless, but it is the only way I have to show that I am contributing to the advancement of science)...

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I’ve always been a details kind of guy and the whole “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth” always seemed kind of vague. I figure it has to have been more interesting than that. . .

1) I just started (probably no credit showing for this project yet) I found about this project from a message board for another project.
2) I believe in the science. No matter what a \"credit monger\" some may consider me, if I don\'t believe in the science, the project gets zero cycles from me. Period. Sometimes, I will consider a project if I find out that my team needs help improving our standing in that project.
3) In order to stay with a project, I have to believe that the project isn\'t too stingy in granting credit. Another (very major) project dropped their credit one time too many for my taste, and now get hardly any cycles from me. My farm has four (out of seven) boxes running 24/7 that probably would not be, if I weren\'t running BOINC on them. Two of them are very noisy, heat-producing, power-hogging, dual Xeon rack-mount file servers. I am \"paid\" for my expenses and trouble with credits, and also with how I\'m treated by other people connected to the project (admins and moderators especially). If I come to think the prevalent attitude is I should be utterly \"BOINC-altruistic\" (thanks for the term, Brian Silvers), and doing this exclusively \"for the science\", then I\'m \"outta\' here!\". I\'m turned off by the air of moral superiority, and frankly quite angered by entire teams that threaten to leave projects for the \"mortal sin\" of granting too much credit. Another example: I was very turned off by the lack of concern one project had with losing WUs (to error, right at the end of the process) that took a week to compute, due to known problems with AMD processors and their application. In stark contrast, I was encouraged by another project gives you some credit, even if your result errors out.
4) I\'m a \"hot-rodder\" (read: performance enthusiast) at heart, and also a tinkerer. I can\'t justify buying the latest C2D, C2Q and i7 hardware on my budget, and I enjoy the challenge of doing it \"on the cheap\". I\'m very competitive. My world standing according to BOINC Statistics for the World! has been dropping again as of late, but was less than 6,000 based on RAC, the last time I checked. I think this is pretty cool, based on how little I have invested in hardware. For instance, one of the aforementioned servers has 2X2.5 gHz Xeons, came with drives and 1GB RAM, and I got it for $75 U.S. plus sales tax!
5) Otherwise, I\'m probably pretty typical. I\'m a caucasian male, almost 50, and have made a living with technology much of my life, most recently in IT. I can\'t imagine that I would be in the running as being \"surprising\" in any way.

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Like the PP, I run projects involving pure science. I come back from the Seti Classic, then since BOINC started, I crunch Seti, Einstein, LHC, and for more than a year now, Cosmo and MW too.

i joined because the last argument of religious people after debunking all their other arguments is usually "but what do scientists know anyway? they can't even explain how it all began!".

the better our understanding about the universe and therefore the better our model of it is the more accurate and credible our theory of how it all began can be.

this is one of the voids that science has in their framework which is often filled with "god" (feel free to pick one, the choice is huge).

i hope you guys can create a cuda app soon ;). thanks for this project.