Posts by Matthew

21) Message boards : News : New Secondary Stream Searches (Message 60168) Posted 18 Oct 2013 by Matthew Post: I've started some new secondary stream searches: de_separation_09_2s_sSgrFree_1 de_separation_10_2s_sSgrFree_1 These are looking to characterize the secondary component of the Sagittarius tidal stream. As always, let me know if anything seems off with them.
22) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 60167) Posted 18 Oct 2013 by Matthew Post: Thanks for the feedback - I've been toying around with different design paradigms and haven't settled on one yet. I didn't know about the third party services that display badges 32x32 pixels, but that definitely explains why other projects seem to use that size exclusively. I'm leaning towards using 32x32 badges, which will be abstract pixelart representation of objects. Then I'll build a page on the website that explains them in detail. I hope to get some examples up in the next few days.
23) Message boards : MilkyWay@home Science : What in the world does this project do? (Message 60166) Posted 18 Oct 2013 by Matthew Post: We've been working on that - see our YouTube channel! http://www.youtube.com/user/MilkywayAtHomeRPI
24) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59992) Posted 25 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: I am working on it - but I'm also juggling a bunch of other work. I hope to have the badge system up in October!
25) Message boards : MilkyWay@home Science : What am I actually doing? (Message 59871) Posted 10 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: See Part III of the science page: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/science.php#part3 Each work unit is a single "guess" at the parameters that best describe the part of the Galaxy being studied. The crunching that you are doing is a massive computation that compares a single set of parameters to a single set of data; the math that we do is really, really complicated (see Nathan Cole's thesis), and has to be done for each star in the data, so it requires a lot of crunching power. Each "guess" is then compared to the data then returned to the server. The server then uses advanced statistics to determine which "guesses" would be the best to try next. Eventually, the algorithm converges to a set of parameters that the absolute ("global") best, or the "maximum likelihood" that those parameters describe the data. These bests then have to be checked by a human to see if they are reasonable, as sometimes the algorithm finds a solution that gives a good likelihood, but makes no physical sense (such as finding a tidal stream the size of the MilkyWay galaxy...). Since we use only a portion of our data at a time, sometimes local effects can skew the algorithm - it's not perfect! But we are constantly making it better - when a new version of the app(s) is released, it usually includes a new feature designed to improve the search.
26) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59868) Posted 10 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: Here are some sample badges that I whipped together: 25k - Galactic Center 66k - Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy 175k - Large & Small Magellanic Clouds The "token" (background) color will will get "hotter" with each badge - dull red to bright red, to orange, through the rainbow to blue, and eventually bright violet and/or white. I need to add transparency, and maybe they should be a bit smaller, but I want to see what everyone thinks.
27) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59867) Posted 10 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: I like another idea that hasn't been floated and is probably too hard to implement...awarding longtime crunchers more credits then newbies, JUST because they are long time crunchers. Credit totals are supposed to be directly proportional to the number of FLOPS crunched, and so any credit increases would be met with harsh criticism from other project and new crunchers on MilkyWay@home. Or even a badge with a number imbedded on it to represent how long you have been crunching in years for the project. This is closer to what we'd like to do.
28) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59829) Posted 6 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: We are also toying around with the idea of having "long-service medals," in which users receive medals based on the amount of time that they have been active in the project - even the highest levels of these medals could be achieved by users with relatively low average credit. These badges could be based on events in the history of the universe, starting from the Big Bang, or they could be service medals, such as a medal with a big "2" for 2 years of work, for example.
29) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59820) Posted 5 Sep 2013 by Matthew Post: My astronomy degree slightly dislikes using Universe landmarks for MILKYWAY@home, but that's just a background niggle. I toyed around with other distance scales, but they end up not going anywhere if you want 1 credit to equal 1 unit of distance. Basically, we need a scale (if we want to use landmarks) that goes from ~10k to 10 Billion, so that we have room to grow. If you use meters or kilometers (or miles), 1 billion will not even get you outside of our solar system. I think 1 ly per credit lets you pass interesting things at credit landmarks. The light-year landmark is a pretty good idea, in my opinion, but it may result in pretty large gaps between badges. Could someone come up with a decent scale for light-year based badges? I'm not sure what you mean by this. I looked at the badge systems for other BOINC projects and tried to find universe landmarks close to their badge requirements. The system is not set in stone, yet. I'll start coming up with some sample badges.
30) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59767) Posted 30 Aug 2013 by Matthew Post: Alternatively, we could do the life cycle of a single star (like the Sun), or the life of the Milky Way Galaxy (1 credit=1year), starting at the Big Bang. Badges would then be given when certain famous objects formed. Also, we want to implement donor badges, for the many users who have donated currency to the project so far.
31) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59766) Posted 30 Aug 2013 by Matthew Post: I'm a fan of having the badge images represent physical things - such as the life cycle of a star, or cosmic distance scales. As for badges, I think the first one should be easy to get - 10k credits or so, as sort of a "welcome to the project!" badge. The next step up could be 100k, and larger and larger from there. I don't think we should "punish" the CPU-only crunchers just because the GPU crunchers can get many more credits; instead, we should make the higher-level badges that much cooler. :) A suggestion for increasingly bright star types, and stellar evolution: Bok Globule -> Protoplanetary Disk -> Pre-main-sequence Star -> Brown Dwarf -> Red Dwarf (M) -> Orange MS (K) -> Yellow MS (G) -> Yellow-White MS (F) -> White MS (A) -> White-Blue MS (B) -> Blue MS (O) -> Subgiant -> Red Giant -> Blue Giant -> RR Lyrae Variable -> Cepheid Variable -> Nova -> Supernova -> Planetary Nebula -> White Dwarf -> Neutron Star -> Black Hole Or Universe landmarks at distances equal to credit total in light-years: 1 credit - Galaxy Traveller (Leaving the Solar System) 25k - Galactic Center 66k - Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy 175k - Large & Small Magellanic Clouds 450k - Fornax Dwarf Galaxy 820k - Leo I Dwarf Galaxy 1.4M - Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy 2.5M - Andromeda Galaxy 12.0M - M81 (Bode's Galaxy, most distant object visible to human eye) 27M - Pinwheel Galaxy 55M - Virgo Cluster 100M - Leaving the Local Supercluster 300M - Coma Cluster (First Evidence of Dark Matter!) 650M - Shapley Supercluster (Large nearby cluster of Galaxies) 1.0B - 1 Gigalightyear! 2.0B - Quasar 3C273 (First Quasar ever discovered) [Other Stuff] 12.9 - Most distant known Quasar 13.7B - Edge of Observable Universe 62.0B - Cosmological Event Horizon
32) Message boards : News : MilkyWay server backups (Message 59705) Posted 27 Aug 2013 by Matthew Post: Hello everyone, We are running some big backups of the MilkyWay@home server today and tomorrow, and while to don't expect any problems, there might be some slowdown with server processes. -Matthew
33) Message boards : News : User location visualization (Message 59073) Posted 24 Jun 2013 by Matthew Post: Why I am not on the map :( Aleppo-Syria I believe the map is of 10,000 randomly-selected users who have recently returned results. It would be cool to see this map with all active users included - and maybe a version with every registered user, ever...
34) Message boards : News : Milkyway@home paper Accepted for Publication! (Message 59072) Posted 24 Jun 2013 by Matthew Post: Congratulations! Any updates on this or estimated date of availability? A PDF is available on arxiv.org, as in the first post: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1476 The Harvard ADS abstract page for the paper is here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013AJ....145..163N
35) Message boards : News : New Separation Runs Started (Message 58364) Posted 21 May 2013 by Matthew Post: I have started runs: de_separation_18_2s_sscon_1 de_separation_19_2s_sscon_1
36) Message boards : News : New Runs for Separation search (Message 58166) Posted 8 May 2013 by Matthew Post: Hello - I've started some new separation runs: de_separation_14_2s_sscon_1 de_separation_15_2s_sscon_1 I expect these to run smooth, but let me know if you have any problems! -Matthew
37) Message boards : News : New Separation Runs (Message 58055) Posted 29 Apr 2013 by Matthew Post: I've started a new run: de_separation_13_2s_sscon_1 This one should be shorter than the previous ones. As always, please let us know if you run into any problems.
38) Message boards : MilkyWay@home Science : Czech Translation of Milkyway@home science page (Message 58023) Posted 26 Apr 2013 by Matthew Post: There appears to be technical difficulties with the translated page right now; they should be fixed by next Monday.
39) Message boards : MilkyWay@home Science : Czech Translation of Milkyway@home science page (Message 58012) Posted 25 Apr 2013 by Matthew Post: Alex Novak has been kind enough to translate the Milkyway@home science page into the Czech language: http://czlib.bizow.com/post/vda-shrnuti Thanks for this, Alex, and I hope it is useful to our users in the Czech Republic!
40) Message boards : Number crunching : Rcent Errors on new work here (Message 58011) Posted 25 Apr 2013 by Matthew Post: Check out the recent posts in this thread: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/forum_thread.php?id=3205

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