On August 12, 2010, the Einstein@Home project announced the discovery of a previously unknown pulsar, remarkable not only for its physical characteristics, but the method of discovery. Chris's personal computer had processed and returned the packet containing the data for the first pulsar detected by volunteer distributed computing. Helen and Chris have both been running distributed computing applications since SETI@Home debuted in 1999, and after the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) was launched, allowing us to run multiple projects, we added Einstein@Home almost as soon as it was made available in 2005. We created a joint account for that project, which may have helped the project organizers find us in real life. We participated in an NSF-sponsored news conference and various media interviews, and got to visit the team in Hannover, where we had the first and second authors sign our copy of Science that had the article about the discovery, Pulsar Discovery by Global Volunteer Computing. That's now framed alonsgside the GPU and CPU responsible for the discovery in our living room.
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