http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/ BOINC project MilkyWay@home: Main page News AstroInformatics Group Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:27:11 GMT en-us http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/rss_image.gif http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/ http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#227 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#227 Just noticed a problem with the assimilator crashing. It should be back up and running and work should start flowing again. Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#226 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#226 There's been a lot of questions about upgrading the server and putting out server side ATI applications so here's an update about what's going on on our side:We do have versions of the ATI applications available, however here's some changes that the astronomers need to test to put in these applications so we're partially working on getting those all ready before we do a big update and put everything out for everyone.To make a long story short, the model we're crunching now (while valuable) has some problems in describing the background distribution of stars in the milky way galaxy. What the application does is tries to separate stars which were ripped apart from other galaxies that came close to the milkyway (like the saggitarius stream, which is what our current focus is on) as well as other clusters of stars from stars that were more 'originally' in the milky way. This will let us figure out the current shape of the milky way and give us interesting information about how galaxies interact and things of that nature. So right now we've found out that how astronomers have describing the 'background' stars of the milky way really isn't very correct. I'm pretty sure Heidi and her students are working on some kind of publication dealing with this issue right now. So to deal with that issue, they've been testing different models which should help with this in getting us even better models that deal with this problem. So currently you guys have helped us find a problem in astronomies current view of the milky way, and hopefully will help us really understand what the milky way looks like. So while we may not be very fast in upgrading hardware, we're at least doing some astronomy here :P Computer science too - we've just submitted a paper to this year's PPAM (parallel processing and applied mathematics) conference describing the GPU work, which I should be making a link available to everyone as soon as it's accepted. I'm sorry that the server issues go unattended for so long, but we don't have anyone really doing the networking. It's just me in my spare time (which i have none of right now while i'm finishing writing my phd thesis). Before we had Dave to work on that but he's graduated and we haven't found another undergraduate student to work on this yet. Hopefully next semester we'll have another one. We're in the process of ordering new hardware which should improve the performance of the server, but it will be a couple weeks before it gets here, and probably another week or two before we've updated all the server side code to work on multiple CPUs.--Travis Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#225 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#225 I've started some new searches with larger sized workunits, so hopefully these will help the server strain. Let us know how they're running.--Travis Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#224 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#224 We've been looking into the website performance and it looks like we're going to be ordering some more hardware in the next couple weeks which should improve the performance. Until then you're probably just going to have to bear with the website slowness. I'm currently trying to finish up my phd thesis (I defend in less than 2 weeks), so I probably won't be frequenting the forums very much until then.--Travis Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#223 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#223 As most of you have noticed, the Milkyway@home database crashed yesterday. It appears that the database managed to corrupt itself, then failed in a spectacular fashion. We are busy cleaning up the mess, and everything will be sorted out soon. A special thanks to the support staff for the server, as they managed to restore the database at 5am this morning.--Matthew Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#222 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#222 I've also made a powerpoint version of the slides from our BOINC workshop presentation here. Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#221 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#221 Hello from the 5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop in Barcelona! I had my presentation today so I'm making the slides available to everyone. You can download them here (sorry they're in keynote for all the Windows users out there). I'll be back next week so try not to break anything before then.--Travis Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#220 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#220 One of our astronomers started up some searches today, but it looks like the workunit size was too small and the server couldn't keep up. We're going to start up some new searches tomorrow which should take longer to process and not make the website unusable and server unaccessible.--Travis Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#219 http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#219 Server went down last night but I've fixed the problem and everything should be up and running smoothly again.--Travis Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT