MilkyWay@home Project News: Server and Application Updates

[Free-DC]

Sorry for the recent lack of communication, but we've been working on quite a few things behind the scenes here. First, my new laptop just came in the mail, so I'll be able to seriously start working on a CUDA version of the milkyway application. We'll be developing this for OS X, Linux and Windows. Second, we're going to be doing a few server-side changes to how things are run, which should significantly help with workunit reporting and work availability. We'll be splitting MilkyWay@Home into two separate applications/backends, Milkyway regular and Milkyway GPU. This will allow us to keep current workunit sizes for non-GPU applications, while farming a lot more work out to the GPUs (so they need to contact the server less frequently). We'll be doing different optimization methods on the regular Milkway and the GPU Milkyway so they'll both be doing equally valid research. In the next day or two I'll be posting the code that the application will be using for the GPU version. After testing to make sure that it's working correctly we'll swap to only awarding credit to the GPU applications for GPU milkyway (that way our servers wont be as bogged down, which will mean better work availability). Also, before a credit firestorm erupts again, we have no plans to award less credit/work to the GPU applications, so you don't need to worry about that.

More... (http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#163)