You're right that we haven't said much about what we're doing in a while, so I'll take this opportunity to give a bit more info about what we are currently working on. Overall, the project goals are still the same as what Link shared from the science page.

The current runs are looking at the Orphan-Chenab Stream, and are a continuation of the work we previously did that is discussed in this paper. With the updates we have made to the simulation over last few years, we are now able to do many of the things that we laid out as future goals. The major changes to our simulations since this paper are:

-We now have orbit fitting included in our simulations, so we are able to fit the path of the dwarf galaxy through the sky as well as well as the properties of the dwarf itself.
-We are now able to include the LMC in our simulations. Since the gravitational influence of the LMC has a notable effect on the OCS, we have also included the LMC mass as an additional parameter that can be fit.
-We are now using additional observational data from the Dark Energy Survey. This is the southern portion of the OCS, which we were not looking at previously.
-We are in the process of including more dwarf models.
-Various updates to the physics of the simulation and our analysis.

Being able to do orbit fitting gives us a lot more freedom with what we are actually able to use since it will ensure the stream's end position matches what we observe as best as possible. This allows us to run optimizations for a variety of different situations (changing both dwarf galaxy and Milky Way models along with having a variable LMC mass) and see how they change our best fit values for the dwarf (and see which orbit matches best). Doing this is the main goal at the moment, and the majority of our runs for the next year or so will be working on this. Most of what we have been doing recently has been with the same Milky Way model used in that paper but with our new code changes. We have started doing some runs with MW2014, and if all goes well we will shortly be shifting our focus into optimizing the dwarf for it instead.

Let me know if there's anything else you're curious about. I'll see try to give more small updates now and then going forward, but for the most part things don't change all that much.

Thanks a lot for the reply. Is the research using data like it used to from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? Or maybe something else?

Yes, we are still using the SDSS data that we were using before, and the current runs are also using some data from the Dark Energy Survey and other data taken with the Dark Energy Camera. Other people in the group are also using data from the Gaia survey. None of that data is being used for the tasks that are currently being sent out, but it will likely be used in whatever project we do next after our work with the Orphan stream.

but it will likely be used in whatever project we do next after our work with the Orphan stream.

I hope that there will be an alert about this moment. Thank you.

@gimmyk: can you please check why the server sends me sometimes a single thread task when I have selected 7 threads per task in the preferences? I think this should not happen and AFAICT it didn't happen before v1.94 was released. The main issue is they just sit there and wait for a single thread to become available which never happens so I have to abort them. This time the ST application is not just the MT application running with "--nthreads 1", so I can't override it via app_config.xml.

And my first v1.95 task was single thread task. At least I could fix it with app_config as it's the MT binary using a single thread. Now it's running using 7 threads as requested in my online settings, so I don't need to abort it.

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I really have no idea why you started getting single thread tasks. I don't think we have made any changes to how tasks are sent out that would have changed this. I'm sorry to say this might just have to be an annoyance you'll have to put up with for a while.

The good news is that you should be able to fix all of these with app_config from now on. I do think a mistake was made with the 1.94 binary so it was not made as expected. The last run that was using v1.94 just finished, so unless you get one of the remaining tasks that still needs validation you will not see any more of those.

The good news is that you should be able to fix all of these with app_config from now on.

That's good enough for me. :-)

I do think a mistake was made with the 1.94 binary so it was not made as expected. The last run that was using v1.94 just finished, so unless you get one of the remaining tasks that still needs validation you will not see any more of those.

The interesting thing is, that I got some single thread tasks for 1.94 when it started, than some in the middle of February when I posted here about it and so far never again. And I'm running nearly only v1.94, so that were some strange hickups on the server side I guess. I repeated now what I did in February: I changed threads per task to 14, saved it, and than back to 7. Will see if that works again. Perhaps I need to remind the server every now and than what I want to have. LOL

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I really have no idea why you started getting single thread tasks.

I think I know: I have selected only "Milkyway@home N-Body Simulation" (i.e. v1.94) and enabled "If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications?". Now I enabled both applications and disabled "other applications" and I'm pretty sure I won't get any single thread tasks from now on. We will see...

If this is true, that's an issue for everyone, who wants to select a specific application and specific amount of threads while having other applications as backup. Dropping the selected amount of threads per task might make sense on other projects, where other applications might not have MT support, but here it should not happen IMHO, at least as long as all applications support MT.

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