After nearly a decade of continuous operation, Universe@Home has announced the end of its activities. The project launched in 2015 as the first BOINC-based computing project run by a Polish scientific institution, and over the years grew to nearly 30,000 participating computers across the globe. The simulations it powered — running the StarTrack code on the idle machines of tens of thousands of volunteers — contributed to over a dozen published papers, from the landmark 2016 Nature paper on GW150914 to studies of neutron star mergers, ultraluminous X-ray sources, and, most recently, spin distributions in binary black hole populations.
The closure is inseparable from the loss of Prof. Krzysztof Belczyński, the creator of StarTrack and the scientific founder of Universe@Home, who passed away on 13 January 2024. Krzysztof dreamed up Universe@Home on the conviction that the volunteers who donate their computing time to science deserve to know what that science is — and to take pride in what it produces. The project’s full publication list is archived at universeathome.pl/universe/publications.php. The research programme continues at CAMK PAN.
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