At some point into my 5th month of mining for Gridcoin, I got burnt out. For too long had I been spending endless night-time hours optimising my project choices; perfecting my resource share distribution; keeping up with all project news to predict work unit queue depletion... all to get the highest magnitude possible and maximise my mint. It was not why I joined Gridcoin, and I was no longer enjoying it.

The reason I first came to love this coin is because it harnesses the power of crypto currency compute in a way no other coin does. That spoke to me on a personal level, often having found myself struggling to complete my own research due to a lack of compute resources. One night, when discussing this burnout with @vortac (who first brought me into the community), I decided to simply stop giving a toss about magnitude. I picked the project that seemed the coolest, and threw most of my compute behind that because I wanted to.

So began my hunt for a pulsar with [email protected]

To give a little background on the topic, neutron stars are what remains after a star has gone supernova. This leaves behind an incredibly dense mass of exotic matter in the tens of kilometers in diameter. Despite this, these neutron stars can weight a million times more than Earth does.

As a result of the strong magnetic fields and the high rotational velocity of these neutron stars, they send out beams of gamma rays in a way not dissimilar to a cosmic lighthouse. Sometimes, there beams may sweep across the Earth, making the neutron star visible as a pulsating gamma ray source - this is a pulsar. One of the two primary aims of [email protected] is to detect these pulsars, which takes an enormous amount of compute for signal analysis. Below you can see the 13 most recent pulsars discovered by the project, as viewed looking into the plane of the galactic core.

It has been just under a month since I made the switch to hunt pulsars, and I have in the past hour crossed the 20 million RAC threshold. I consider this a huge achievement, as when I set out on this journey the (playful) aim was to out-compete the German ATLAS supercluster, which had been hitting around 19 million RAC.

For a brief moment, I had a higher throughput than ATLAS, before they threw everything up a gear and shot back up to position 1. It will come as no surprise that the ATLAS cluster alone is responsible for the discovery of 3 unique pulsars already.

I will continue the pulsar hunt, as I thoroughly enjoy mining Gridcoin again. Every day I come into the lab and am keen to see how much of the sky my machines have scanned ([email protected] keeps fantastic project completion stats). In the end isn't this what we are all about? Making a difference to humanity and having a blast doing it.

Whether you are helping find the next drug, listening for ET, or mapping the cosmos, it's pretty cool to know that when all the money business is said and done you have made a tangible difference.

P.S. for those of you who have been asking - you will not be competing against me for the 10,000 GRC GPUGrid rain from @vortac. My cluster is far too busy scanning the stars.

Content Credit:

Pulsar Map, [email protected]