KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[KWSN - News]

A user posted a question on the forums asking what we've done so far, and I figured the response might be newsworthy:

We've actually already gotten some interesting results. We've crunched through 5-10 asynchronous genetic searches (AGS) for two different sizes of volumes. We're comparing this data to how the AGS converges on the Rensselaer
grid and BlueGene (results we presented in the eScience paper linked on the main page), and hope to have another publication out this month comparing Boinc, the RPI Grid and the BlueGene for the astronomy project. Before the
server issues, the project was assimilating about 2-3 workunits a second, which is comparable to the large partition of the BlueGene we have used (1024 processors). So far what we've done is pretty promising :)

Once we get the new binaries, we'll be able to test all different kinds of searches like particle swarm, simulated annealing and some others to see which work best for the astronomy application and which scale the best and are
most resistant to the heterogeneity of BOINC, just to mention a few things. Nate should also be updating the code in a week or so with the 'convolution' which makes the calculation a lot more complicated - but more accurate.
Instead of testing the astronomy model to fixed star points, it's tested against star points that are probabilistic distributions, increasing the computation by almost an order of magnitude. How that works out will be really
interesting to see I've talked to Nate and hopefully he'll be posting a bit more about how the convolution works and what it'll be doing.

--Travis

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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.