KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[KWSN - News]

Here's an update about what we're currently doing (taken from the forums):

Right now we're looking into two different things:

1. The effect of the asynchronous return time of work units on the quality of the genetic searches we're running. If you'd like to read more about the asynchronous genetic
search we're running, we have some papers we sent out recently to workshops/conferences detailing the search -- but we only had results using the new BlueGene supercomputer
here at RPI, and our local RPI Grid of clusters.

The papers can be found here:
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~deselt/desell_genetic_ppam_2007.pdf
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~deselt/hcw2008.pdf

What we're hoping to do with this information is determine what effect a really heterogeneous computing environment has on our asynchronous genetic search, and figure out ways
to optimize the search for these types of environments.

2. The astronomy program we're running currently calculates an integral over the wedge of the sky we're modeling. Since it's not possible to actually integrate the function
we're interested in, we have to calculate the integral the old fashioned (and expensive way) of calculating a bunch of points and calculating the area between them. The next
few searches we plan on doing will calculate the integral with varying accuracy - so expect work units of varying times (probably 8 minutes to over an hour). With these results
we'll be able to figure out what effect the integral accuracy has on the rate our genetic search converges to a solution, and what effect the integral accuracy has on the
quality of the answer.

Some other things that we have in the works is that i've been working on an asynchronous particle swarm algorithm to use (as opposed to asynchronous genetic search). For a
brief overview of what particle swarm optimization is, wikipedia isn't too shabby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_swarm_optimization . We'll be able to contrast and
compare these two searches, which should be interesting.

Also, we're using the results to compare doing this work on BOINC to the BlueGene supercomputer at RPI. Who knows, with enough participants in the project -- you guys might
beat out the 7th fastest supercomputer in the world! (see: http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/06 )

--Travis Desell

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Source: MilkyWay@home
BOINC project MilkyWay@home: Main page News
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KWSN DC News reporter reporting from inside the server.