Einstein@Home’s Search for Continuous Waves

The next big gravitational-wave discovery could be that of continuous gravitational waves. A typical search for these waves on a single laptop operating 24/7 would take 2,000 years. The volunteer computing project Einstein@Home makes such computationally intensive searches possible. The project uses your computer’s idle time to search for weak signals from our galaxy. The immense scale of the latest efforts to detect such signals will be explained, with Einstein@Home playing a central role.