Pirates@Home

Pirates@Home
Pirates@Home logo
Project
Status	Completed
Category	Software testing
Compute	CPU
Requires	None
Development
Developer	Eric Myers
Author	Eric Myers
Sponsor	Vassar College (Mission 1); Spy Hill Research (Extended Missions)
Maintainer	Eric Myers
Initial release	2004
Discontinued	c. 2013
Software
Operating system	Windows, Linux, macOS
Metadata
Website	http://pirates.spy-hill.net/

Pirates@Home was a volunteer distributed computing project built on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. It was never intended as a scientific research project in its own right; instead, it served as an important and cheerful test-bed for the development of the BOINC software ecosystem, beginning in 2004. Notably, it played a foundational role in the creation of Einstein@Home, one of the most successful BOINC projects ever launched, and later helped develop BOINC's social software tools. Its playful pirate theme was a deliberate signal to participants that this was not a serious scientific computing project but a platform for experimentation and fun.

Pirates@Home screensaver Scroll 4.53

Background

BOINC and volunteer computing

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open-source middleware system that enables scientists to harness the idle processing power of millions of volunteered home computers around the world. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley by David Anderson as part of the SETI@home project, BOINC was designed to be a general-purpose platform that any researcher could adopt. A BOINC project distributes small packets of work, called work units, to participating computers. Each computer processes its assigned work unit and returns the result. The aggregate of thousands or millions of such calculations amounts to the kind of computational throughput that would otherwise require a dedicated supercomputer.

Setting up a new BOINC project involves configuring server software, designing client applications, testing scheduling, validating results, and building community features. All of these components needed to be tested before any major scientific project could go live. Pirates@Home was created precisely for this purpose.

Einstein@Home and the need for a test project

In 2004, physicist Bruce Allen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics was preparing to launch Einstein@Home, a project that would use volunteer computing to search for continuous gravitational wave signals from spinning neutron stars in data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the GEO 600 detector in Germany. The Einstein@Home team needed a working BOINC project to develop and test the system before its public launch, particularly its distinctive Starsphere screensaver. Eric Myers, then an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, set up Pirates@Home as that prototype. As Myers described it:

To prepare for the design, development and deployment of Einstein@Home I had previously set up another BOINC project for testing, called Pirates@Home.

— Eric Myers, MediaWiki.org

The name was chosen deliberately. As the BOINC wiki explains, the name was chosen to make it clear that it was only a test project, not the beginning of Einstein@Home. A pirate theme fit the bill perfectly: it was memorable, obviously tongue-in-cheek, and gave the project a lively community identity while keeping expectations appropriately low.

Mission 1 (2004 to 2005)

Launch and early operations

Pirates@Home first appeared online in the summer of 2004, with the earliest archived snapshot of the site dated 19 September 2004 — appropriately, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The project was hosted on a server at Vassar College (initially at pirates.vassar.edu) running on Red Hat Linux, later updated to Fedora Core. Participants were welcomed with a characteristically piratical greeting:

Aaargh! Welcome, mates, to the Pirates@Home project! This is a test of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

— Pirates@Home homepage, September 2004

From the outset, the website was transparent about its experimental nature. The project stated plainly that it was not doing any real scientific computation and that participants were just having fun with BOINC. Work units issued during this period were very small test packets, released in limited quantities to verify the BOINC scheduling, validation, and credit systems. BOINC version 4 was required of all participants.

The project homepage listed several potential future sponsors in a humorous fashion, including the National Science Foundation, the American Physical Society, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the GEO 600 collaboration, the World Year of Physics 2005, and the organisers of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

The Starsphere screensaver

Sextant 4.91 - Einstein@Home Starsphere screensaver development

One of the most significant achievements of Mission 1 was the development of the Starsphere screensaver for Einstein@Home. Pirates@Home served as the live testing environment for this 3D screensaver, which was authored by Bruce Allen and David Hammer of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Eric Myers of Vassar College.

The Starsphere screensaver displays a rotating celestial sphere showing the traditional constellations and the positions of the three gravity-wave detector sites represented by "L"-shaped markers — a reference to the fact that each detector is essentially a very large Michelson interferometer:

• LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO), Hanford, Washington, USA (N 46.45°, W 119.41°), consisting of two interferometers with 4 km arms (H1) and 2 km arms (H2).
• LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO), Livingston, Louisiana, USA (N 30.56°, W 90.77°), with one 4 km interferometer (L1).
• GEO600, Hanover, Germany (N 52.24°, E 9.81°), a 600 m interferometer.

The screensaver also renders the known pulsars as purple dots clustered in the plane of the Milky Way, supernova remnants as dark red dots, and nearby galaxies out to 30 megaparsecs as green dots. An orange search-marker indicates the current sky position being analysed, described in right ascension and declination. The screensaver was translated into at least nine languages by the Pirates@Home community, including German, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian.

From a physics standpoint, Einstein@Home was designed to search for gravitational wave signals from rapidly rotating neutron stars. The signal from such a star would be a nearly sinusoidal wave at a frequency related to the star's spin rate and its quadrupole moment $Q_{22}$. The gravitational wave strain amplitude at a distance $r$ is approximately:

$h\approx \frac{16{\pi }^{2}G}{c^4}\frac{f^2{Q}_{22}}{r}$

where $f$ is the gravitational wave frequency (twice the rotation frequency), $G$ is the gravitational constant, and $c$ is the speed of light.

The Pirates@Home project also maintained a dedicated page of Einstein@Home team statistics for the Pirates@Home volunteer team, so participants could track how much computing time their community was contributing to the actual scientific project.

Security incident

On 12 June 2005, the Pirates@Home server was hacked. The intrusion was detected quickly, the server was taken offline, and a full system inspection and reinstallation was performed. The incident was reported to the community on the project forums.

Shutdown of Mission 1

With Einstein@Home officially launched on 19 February 2005 and running successfully, the need for Pirates@Home's original test mission was complete. The project announced on 23 June 2005 that it would shut down the following day:

The Pirates@Home project and web site will shut down sometime in the late morning (EST) on Friday, June 24th, 2005.

— Pirates@Home news, 23 June 2005

The server went offline as planned on 24 June 2005 at approximately 10:50:26 UTC, as recorded in the BOINC Synergy archive snapshot.

Extended Mission (2006 onwards)

New server, new mission

In January 2006, Pirates@Home returned — this time on a new server hosted at pirates.spy-hill.net, running under Myers's own Spy Hill Research operation. The BOINC Wiki records that the project reappeared in January 2006 on a different server to act as a test stand for another LIGO-related project, called Interactions in Understanding the Universe (I2U2).

I2U2 was an NSF-funded science education initiative that aimed to provide high school teachers and students with access to LIGO environmental data — from seismometers, magnetometers, and weather stations — for inquiry-based investigations called "e-Labs." The BOINC discussion forum software was being considered as a platform component for I2U2, and Pirates@Home was used to test it.

BOINC social software development

During the Extended Mission, the additions made to BOINC for I2U2 were focused on social interaction and community features rather than distributed computation. As the BOINC wiki summarises:

The forums were modified to add privacy, to add attachments to postings, to give users limited but rechargable ratings points, and to add keyword classification of postings.

— BOINC Wiki, Pirates@Home

Myers also developed the BOINC Authentication extension for MediaWiki, which allowed a wiki to be integrated seamlessly with a BOINC project, using the BOINC project's user database for authentication rather than requiring a separate wiki login. This extension was demonstrated on the Pirates@Home glossary wiki.

The extended mission also served as a general sandbox for BOINC server modifications. The project wiki maintained a collection of pages classified as "BOINC Hacks," documenting how project administrators and application developers could exercise more refined control over their projects — including a comprehensive list of scheduler restriction techniques.

New account creation during this phase required an invitation code, a feature specifically being tested for potential use in I2U2.

Primates@Home (April Fools 2008)

Primates@Home screensaver Starboard 5.21 featuring the message: gag monkey p

On 1 April 2008, Pirates@Home was temporarily replaced by a spoof project called Primates@Home, which appeared at primates.spy-hill.net. The project homepage proclaimed:

Primates@Home is currently testing what happens to primates when you disturb the natural environment to which they have become accustomed. Do they react with confusion? Bemusement? Anger and hostility? A mixture of these?

— Primates@Home homepage, 1 April 2008

The project listed humorous potential future sponsors including the National Geographic Society, the Bronx Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, the Honolulu Zoo, and the San Diego Zoo. It also featured a "Shakespeare Project" in which participants could solve reCAPTCHA tasks in exchange for virtual bananas. The copyright notice read "Copyright © 2008 Timmy the Monkey."

Final mission and legacy

The project continued intermittently in subsequent years, used for testing new BOINC client and server code before new stable branches were released. The last archived snapshot dates to July 2013. Myers noted on his personal site that he hoped to put the project to good use for a further mission in the future, though no additional mission was publicly documented.

Technical details

The Pirates@Home server was initially configured on a Red Hat 7.3 machine, upgraded to Fedora Core 3 and then Fedora Core 4 over the course of its operation. The project ran on the standard BOINC software stack with a MySQL backend. The BOINC Synergy project catalogue lists it as running on Windows, Linux, and macOS client platforms.

Because Pirates@Home performed no real scientific computation, it generated no floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) in any meaningful sense; any BOINC credits awarded were for testing purposes only, and the work units were essentially trivial placeholder computations. This made it easy to focus on infrastructure testing without worrying about the correctness of scientific results.

The project was configured as a "permanent test project" with intermittent availability. The BOINC wiki entry lists its institution as "Spy Hill Research (under contract to LIGO)" and its official launch date as 02-06-2004.

Impact and significance

Pirates@Home occupies a notable place in the history of volunteer computing. It was one of the earliest BOINC projects after SETI@home itself, and its direct contribution to the infrastructure of Einstein@Home was lasting. The Starsphere screensaver developed and tested through Pirates@Home became a celebrated feature of Einstein@Home, which went on to attract over one million registered users and to contribute to the discovery of dozens of previously unknown radio pulsars.

Beyond the screensaver, Pirates@Home's contributions to BOINC's social and community software — particularly the forum enhancements and the MediaWiki authentication extension — have benefited many subsequent BOINC projects. The "BOINC Hacks" documentation produced through Pirates@Home remains a reference for BOINC project administrators.

The project's cheerful culture also helped establish that BOINC communities could be welcoming and fun, lowering the barrier to participation and demonstrating that volunteer computing projects need not be dry or inaccessible.

See also

• Einstein@Home
• SETI@home
• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
• LIGO
• GEO 600
• Gravitational wave
• Neutron star