MilkyWay@home
Milkyway@home is a research project using Internet-connected computers in modeling and determining the evolution of the Milkyway galaxy. It is based at the Rensselaer Computer Science Department. This particular project is being developed to better understand the power of volunteer computer resources.
Right now we're looking into two different things:
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The effect of the asynchronous return time of work units on the quality of the genetic searches we're running. If you'd like to read more about the asynchronous genetic search we're running, we have some papers that we sent out to workshops/conferences detailing the search - here and here (PDF)- but we only had results using the new BlueGene supercomputer here at RPI, and our local RPI Grid of clusters.
What we're hoping to do with this information is determine what effect a really heterogeneous computing environment has on our asynchronous genetic search, and figure out ways to optimize the search for these types of environments.
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The astronomy program we're running currently calculates an integral over the wedge of the sky we're modeling. Since it's not possible to actually integrate the function we're interested in, we have to calculate the integral the old fashioned (and expensive way) of calculating a bunch of points and calculating the area between them. The next few searches we plan on doing will calculate the integral with varying accuracy - so expect work units of varying times (probably 8 minutes to over an hour). With these results we'll be able to figure out what effect the integral accuracy has on the rate our genetic search converges to a solution, and what effect the integral accuracy has on the quality of the answer. As we are not doing any simulation work but doing data analysis we're only looking at current snapshots of the Milkyway.