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SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:03 pm
by bystander
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
Re: SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:41 pm
by makc
isn't that petaflops, as in FLoating point Operations Per Second? cross my fingers, submit post, check wikipedia...
Re: SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:42 pm
by makc
yep. the article author assumed it's plural, ha ha
Re: SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:47 pm
by bystander
Yeah, but you have to admit one petaflops just doesn't look right. Maybe he should have used 1,000 teraflops.
Re: SD: Home Computers Unite to Map the Milky Way
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 11:42 am
by makc
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.
MilkyWay@Home
Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 4:10 pm
by bystander
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.
Re: MilkyWay@Home
Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:44 pm
by makc
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.
Re: MilkyWay@Home
Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 7:28 pm
by SsDd
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.
Re: MilkyWay@Home
Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 10:49 pm
by makc
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.
Re: MilkyWay@Home
Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 12:53 pm
by Hofi
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.