August 4, 2009

Dear Friend of Science,

If you are receiving this letter, you are probably already donating your computing power to the advancement of science by choosing Milkyway@home in the BOINC infrastructure. Thank you! We are very excited that 28,000 of you have donated your processors to help us discover the spatial structure of the Milky Way, making this our most important resource for this highly computationally intensive task. In this letter we will share with you the progress we have made so far, and ask whether there are some among you who would like to help us with a cash donation so that we can support students involved in this project that will keep the project running through what we anticipate will be a short funding gap in early 2010.

Progress in Galactic structure
With your help, we have made significant progress in tracing the Sagittarius dwarf tidal stream through the halo of the Milky Way. Let us explain what the Sagittarius dwarf tidal stream is, and why it is important. We are only now beginning to understand the process by which galaxies form. The current picture is that galaxies like the Milky Way formed through a “bottom-up” process, meaning that small star clusters and dwarf galaxies formed first. These smaller galaxies merged with each other over time, creating larger and larger conglomerate galaxies. The hydrogen gas in each of these galaxies stuck together, and radiated away energy until it formed a disk of gas in the Galactic plane. Stars like the Sun formed out of this disk gas.
The stars in the outer parts of the Milky Way were actually formed in other galaxies that later merged to make the Milky Way; studying them tells us about the galaxy formation process. What we can see from these stars is that some small galaxies are still merging with the Milky Way even now. When a small “dwarf” galaxy comes close to the center of our galaxy, it experiences tidal forces not unlike the tidal forces that the Moon exerts on the oceans. The dwarf galaxy stars that are closer to the Galactic center are being pulled more strongly by gravity than the stars that are farther away (this is the meaning of the term “tidal force”), and if the difference in force is large enough, the stars get ripped from the dwarf galaxy and start orbiting freely around the Milky Way. By this process, dwarf galaxies are assimilated into the outer parts of the galaxy, known as the “stellar halo.”
Besides telling about how the Milky Way galaxy formed, the tidal debris streams that are formed when stars are pulled from dwarf galaxies can tell us about the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way. It is thought that 90% of the mass in the galaxy is made of a type of matter that does not interact with light or any other type of electromagnetic radiation. Since we see by light (either objects emit their own light, or absorb or reflect it), we cannot see this new type of matter – thus the term “dark matter.” With ever more powerful instruments, we can in principle learn the position and velocity of every star in the Milky Way. However, the stars in tidal streams are the only ones for which we also know where they were in the past; they were all initially bound to the dwarf galaxy. That makes these stars very important for determining the distribution of mass (and thus dark matter) in the Milky Way.
Interestingly, current models of the tidal disruption of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy have created a puzzle because no proposed halo shape fit all parts of the stellar data. The results from Milkyway@home may help us to solve this impasse, because we are finding that previous determinations of the positions of Sagittarius dwarf galaxy tidal debris were incorrect. We are also able to make more accurate determinations of the number of stars in the star stream. We expect that our data will result in better models for tidal disruption that give us a clear message about the shape of tidal debris in the Milky Way galaxy. The better we understand the density of dark matter as a function of position in the Galaxy (and currently the only way we have to detect dark matter is by its effect on matter that we can see, such as stars), the better we can constrain theories of what the dark matter is made of.

Progress in scientific computation
In addition to learning about our own galaxy, Milkyway@home is providing a platform for computer science researchers to develop parallel computing, study distributed computing as a platform for scientific computing, learn how to best use the heterogeneous nature of volunteer computing, and create a general-purpose maximum likelihood engine for scientists. Unlike grids and supercomputers, we do not control the work units processed by BOINC volunteers – you all choose to process work units as it suits you, and you have all types and speeds of processors and network connectivity. We continuously work to develop better asynchronous search algorithms that maximize our productivity from your contributed infrastructure.
We have been astounded by many parts of our experience with BOINC. We are impressed with the quantity and quality of computing resources that have been made available to us by volunteers. We have been impressed by the effort some of you have put into re-writing our code to run quickly on your architectures, and by the feedback we get from the user community on our code. One of our users re-wrote our code so that it worked on a GPU, and showed us how much faster our code would run if we had a GPU version. This sparked activity on our side to make this available to everyone. In a way, we are learning a whole new and interactive way to do computing for science projects that was pioneered by the SETI@home application. But as a scientific community we are only beginning to learn how to use the tremendous resources that are available.

Request for cash donations
The event that sparked this letter is that we are finishing our US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant this year, and that grant is the primary support we have for running the Milkyway@home project. Unfortunately, the NSF program under which we were originally funded no longer exists. We have secured funding that will keep us operating as usual through the end of 2009, and we hope that we will again be funded starting in summer 2010, through some new opportunities that we are pursuing. But, there is a gap.
We are hoping that this letter will raise about $30,000 that we need to support this project through the spring 2010 semester. The majority of our costs directly support students who maintain the servers, answer your questions in the forum, create new Milky Way models and improve the computing infrastructure, and create knowledge from our activities. In so doing, they learn how to become the researchers of the future.
Any capital campaign depends on the participation of very many people at very many levels of support. To make this goal, we hope that there will be one person who will be able to contribute $5000, about two who can contribute $2000, several who can contribute $1000, and so on. We also hope that about 200 of you can donate just $25. A small donation may not seem like much, but put together it is as important as the largest donor. This is a concept that must be easy for the BOINC volunteers to understand!
We have made arrangements for the Dudley Observatory to collect donations, though a special website at:
http://www.dudleyobservatory.org/MilkyWayAtHome/MilkyWayAtHome2.html
From this site, you can contribute through a PayPal account or with a major credit card, and the donation is completely tax deductible for US taxpayers. You can print out a receipt from the site, or we will send you a letter of thanks. If you would like to donate by check or other mechanism, that can also be arranged.
For gifts of $1000 or more, you may specify a person, family, or organization to be acknowledged in research publications which come from Milkyway@home research, and we will send you an author-autographed copy of each publication.
Thank you for the overwhelming support you have already given to this project, and we look forward to working with you in years to come.

Sincerely,

Prof. Heidi Jo Newberg
Prof. Bolek Szymanski
Prof. Carlos Varela
Prof. Malik Magdon-Ismail

I will make a donation next week when i got my salery.

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Donation made.

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Done :-)

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Thanks for the great update! It is much appreciated. In fact, this has inspired me to return to this project after a long absence!

I've happily given $50.

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Don't drink water, that's the stuff that rusts pipes

I'm in for 50.00 as well. Good luck to the MW team!

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4870 GPU
4870 GPU

If everyone that is crunching on this site donated just 30 bucks no more no less do you realize how much you would generate. That is giving up going to one movie for the benefit of science.

>The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number

Well its the same visa card and number i've been using for years now. i'll try again in a day or so when they've hopefully fixed it.
Makimg it hard to donate reduces the amount of donations...

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Cheers,

PeterV

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Donut's, did somebody say Donut's, I'm all for that. Oooop's it's Donations, hehe, I'll get the Ole Card out later and Donut errrrrr Donate some ... :)

Thanks PB, here is your reward

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM ... Thank's Chris ... :)

With all those sticky buns on offer, I just couldn't help myself.

Yum, tasty too! ;-)

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Symington weather report and video feed

We are happy to help. Thank you All for taking steps to insure this projects survival.

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Another try, another fail.
It seems my money isn't good enough...
No worries - an extra 100USD will keep me in chocolate for a while.
That site asks a number of unnecessary questions. All it needs is a payment amount, the card number, the csc/cvc/vvc/whatever, and the name on the card [as other sites ask, and typeable in one box rather than 3] rather than 'your name'. If I'm little 5yo freddie and i borrowed daddy's M/C to order some pizza, a payment incorporating 'the name on the card' is much more likely to go through than one with 'your name'.
And why would they want my address and phone# anyway? Surely, in my 20yrs at the same address whith the same phone# and bank account they have managed to record it somewhere. If they ask stupid questions they are likely to get stupid replies.
By this stage I was expecting them to go the full Nigerian and ask for my bank account# and PIN as well...

As I said in my previous post - if they make it hard for people to donate then they can expect less in donations.

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Cheers,

PeterV

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Another try, another fail.
It seems my money isn't good enough...
No worries - an extra 100USD will keep me in chocolate for a while.
That site asks a number of unnecessary questions. All it needs is a payment amount, the card number, the csc/cvc/vvc/whatever, and the name on the card [as other sites ask, and typeable in one box rather than 3] rather than 'your name'. If I'm little 5yo freddie and i borrowed daddy's M/C to order some pizza, a payment incorporating 'the name on the card' is much more likely to go through than one with 'your name'.
And why would they want my address and phone# anyway? Surely, in my 20yrs at the same address whith the same phone# and bank account they have managed to record it somewhere. If they ask stupid questions they are likely to get stupid replies.
By this stage I was expecting them to go the full Nigerian and ask for my bank account# and PIN as well...

As I said in my previous post - if they make it hard for people to donate then they can expect less in donations.

When ordering parts from Newegg, one is required to have the billing address entered. When I order books from Amazon, billing address is required. I suppose it's going to boil down to whether or not you trust Paypal, which is the largest site of it's kind on the internet which has to conform to PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard security protocols, known as PCIDSS, which you can look up Paypal's page here and visit the Security Standards Council's web site here.

My past experience in a former job was programming the credit card interfacing with multiple credit processors, including proprietary and ISO-8583 formats. If you are swiping a card, in theory it means that the cardholder is present. This provides data that is encoded on the magnetic strip that is referred to as "Track 1", "Track 2", and sometimes "Track 3". Swiped transactions usually do not require billing info, that's why you can typically go into a store and swipe your card without any information on file. CNP (Card / Cardholder Not Present) transactions are a totally different type of transaction, and places that do not attempt to verify your identity are actually inviting chargebacks and fraud.

I could go into so much more, but the bottom line is that either you trust Paypal or you don't. I've had an account with them for several years now and have not had a single issue. The choice is yours...

-Brian

I had no problem with the site taking my $50 credit card donation.

Made a donation with PayPal, no probs. ;-)

@some Admin:
Will there be a list of donators later or do we get donation crowns like on other projects? Would be nice... :-)

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Member of BOINC@Heidelberg and ATA!

My BOINCstats

Used my Discovery Card to make a $50 Donution with no Problems ... :P

Now where was that Plate of Donuts again ... :)

Well,it is not much,but I´ve spend 10 Dollar to Milkyway@home !

says Tommy the german Wetterman