SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:03 pm

Home Computers Around the World Unite to Map the Milky Way
Science Daily - 2010 Feb 10

At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy.

Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world's second fastest supercomputer.

MilkyWay@Home

makc · Post by **makc** » Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:41 pm

isn't that petaflops, as in FLoating point Operations Per Second? cross my fingers, submit post, check wikipedia...

makc · Post by **makc** » Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:42 pm

yep. the article author assumed it's plural, ha ha

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:47 pm

Yeah, but you have to admit one petaflops just doesn't look right. Maybe he should have used 1,000 teraflops.

makc · Post by **makc** » Thu Feb 11, 2010 11:42 am

bystander wrote:Maybe he should have used 1,000 teraflops.

That reminds me Nereid gender story, just how much do we assume on daily basis? I checked the article again, and no author name is given

Of course, you may be in your right to assume it's "he", if most of their writers are known to be males.

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Sun Feb 14, 2010 4:10 pm

MilkyWay@Home

The goal of Milkyway@Home is to use the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources in creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

makc · Post by **makc** » Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:44 pm

on the day of your milky way @ home last post (probably a week ago) I emailed three people who run this project about renderings of current best match. none replied

this only re-inforced my sentiments towards this kind of projects: why waste hours of your cpu time to help someone to write their papers and advance thier careers without giving a thing back to you... not even an email.

SsDd · Post by **SsDd** » Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:28 pm

I understand your concerns makc. Wiki puts the total number of Milkyway@home volunteer contributors at 44,900 users and 1,590 teams in 170 countries. That is a lot of people. While I agree that reaching out to volunteers makes for better PR. and makes our volunteer contributions seem worthwhile, I would think that is is probably impossible to reply to most almost emails.

makc · Post by **makc** » Thu Apr 15, 2010 10:49 pm

SsDd wrote:our volunteer contributions

assuming you're involved with the project, can you answer it here? where do we get the latest rendering? I have found this thread but there doesnt seem to be much progress.

Hofi · Post by **Hofi** » Wed May 12, 2010 12:53 pm

MilkyWay@home sounds a good idea. But I cannot remember to have heard any results from SETI@home and EINSTEIN@home. Does anyone of you know whether there have been results, yet? If the amount of computing power is really so great, there should have been some nice finds.

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