MilkyWay@Home: News

N-body screensaver available for testing

Sat, 12 May 2012 01:48:47 GMT

I wrote a screensaver for the nbody application. You can manually install it and try it from here: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/download/nbody_0.92/ (available for Linux, Windows and OS X 64 bit. OS X requires 10.7 Lion). It requires OpenGL 3.2 so it needs a DirectX 10 class GPU (Something newer than Radeon HD 2xxx or GeForce 8000 series) The screensaver has various mouse and keyboard controls for viewing the simulations. A list of all controls can be accessed by pressing the h or ? keys. You can manipulate the camera by dragging with the mouse and zooming with the scroll wheel. There are a couple of known problems which you may run into:

- For workunits with larger timesteps, it seems very jumpy. There's an option to update at some interval instead of at every opportunity. There is another option to stop the simulation to wait for the graphics, so that every timestep is drawn as a frame and the animation is smooth. - The orbit trace view will not do what you expect except when using the option to stop the simulation for the graphics - The optional axes are ugly - The preference descriptions aren't very good

I added a bunch of preferences to the web project preferences, but they're not quite finished yet (e.g. the default values don't show up in the boxes when you don't have them set). I made a small demo video a while ago demonstrating it: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/download/random_stuff/nbody_graphics_sample.mp4 Try it out, and see if you like it! If you run into any problems or have any recommendations for future versions, please leave a comment below.

New Separation Runs

Tue, 01 May 2012 22:47:09 GMT

I started 2 new separation runs today: ps_separation_09_2s_sample_1 ps_separation_10_2s_sample_1 Post here or in the Number Crunching Message Board if you notice anything strange about them! -Matthew N

UPDATE: Work Stoppage Remedied

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:39:09 GMT

It looks as though certain processes got stuck, so I manually killed them then restarted all of the BOINC systems. Things look like they are running smoothly now. Let me know if you have any more problems. -Matthew

Work Stoppage

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:54:12 GMT

We are currently experiencing no work going out. This has been escalated to the team and we hope to have it resolved shortly. We are sorry for the delay in the repair. Blurf

New Nbody Run

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:46:25 GMT

A new NBody run has been posted. We are trying to determine the initial dark matter distribution of some test data. There have been some improvements to our model which should hopefully result in faster convergence times. The run is titled nbody_100K_Plum_EMD. All previous Nbody runs have been taken down.

New Separation Runs

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:21:05 GMT

I've just started up some new runs, with names like "ps_separation_14_2s_..." and "ps_separation_15_2s_...". These runs are designed to study some of the Computer Science that drives Milkyway@home. As always, let me know if you have any trouble with these work units. -Matthew N