Dear Volunteers,

Thank you all for your support of MilkyWay@home. Whether you have supported us through lending us your computational power, aided us financially, or both, we could not have done it without you!

Thanks to our generous donors, we have surpassed $23k, over half of our goal! If you have not donated and wish to do so, I have good news. We will now be sending out T-shirts until December 1st. As before, if you donate $100 or more you are eligible to receive a T-shirt sent to any address in the world. Sizes available are adult Small, Medium, Large, XLarge, XXLarge, or XXXLarge. See our Fundraising Page for more details about the T-shirts:
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/fundraiser.php#tshirts

For details on how to donate:
http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/fundraiser.php#how_to_donate

Again, thank you all for your generous support,
-Sidd

This is my favourite project as I am hopeful the project can lead to a simulation much like the SDSS video created showing the galaxies a few years ago. I wonder if the team has considered launching a Kickstarter fund raising campaign as the promise of an interactive or fly through event could generate massive interest given the challenge it would represent.

T-shirts are great idea! Looking forward to it!

BTW: But using CUDA, writing the interactive FLY-through-MilkyWay app is:
No challenge at all. :)

Most of GPUs still used today (up to 2 or 3 years old mobile hi-ends included) are able to render ALL stars in MilkyWay galaxy in realtime! :)


(Ok, maybe on some old or low-end GPUs, or *mobile* phone GPUs {Tegra K1?} there would be a feature of pre-rendering starGroups and nebulas *once* every 2 seconds and 4-times {or proportionally to the distance} per second for those really NEAR the camera, because of the rapid change in angle at which you look at them... :-))) )

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Melwen - Child of the Fangorn Forest
Rig "BRISINGR" [ASUS G73-JH, i7 720QM 1.73, 4x2GB DDR3 1333 CL7, ATi HD5870M 1GB GDDR5],bought on 2011-02-24