BRaTS@Home
BRaTS@Home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do various calculations in Gravitational Ray Tracing. BRaTS stands for BRaTS Ray Trace Simulator. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.
More information (taken from the project message board)
What this project does is various calculations in ray tracing and gravitational lensing. What that does is simulate the bending of light from distant source by massive object. General Relativity states that light paths are bent in gravitational fields, just like trajectories of objects with mass. What I am doing here is simulating that.
The images you see at http://lensing.davecoss.com/ are some I've created already. There are two planes, image and source. A point on the image plane is chosen. Then the position on the source plane that that point would correspond to is calculated. This calculation is based on the mass in the image, or lens, plane. The images I've already produced were made on either my DELL or on our Beowulf cluster here at the University.
The calculation is done brute force over a large grid (basically O(N^3)). That why it takes alot of computing power. So I moved to BOINC for that. The bulk of the calculations is figuring out the deflection angle. That what is being done now. Another part is flattening a 3 dimensional object(s) into a 2 dimensional density. So it's "spacy" in so much as it simulates things that happen in space (over many Mpc's).
Who is involved?
BRaTS@Home is run by David Coss and based in a lab in the US.