MilkyWay@home Project News: Server Updates and ATI Applications

[Free-DC]

There's been a lot of questions about upgrading the server and putting out server side ATI applications so here's an update about what's going on on our side:We do have versions of the ATI applications available, however here's some changes that the astronomers need to test to put in these applications so we're partially working on getting those all ready before we do a big update and put everything out for everyone.To make a long story short, the model we're crunching now (while valuable) has some problems in describing the background distribution of stars in the milky way galaxy. What the application does is tries to separate stars which were ripped apart from other galaxies that came close to the milkyway (like the saggitarius stream, which is what our current focus is on) as well as other clusters of stars from stars that were more 'originally' in the milky way. This will let us figure out the current shape of the milky way and give us interesting information about how galaxies interact and things of that nature. So right now we've found out that how astronomers have describing the 'background' stars of the milky way really isn't very correct. I'm pretty sure Heidi and her students are working on some kind of publication dealing with this issue right now. So to deal with that issue, they've been testing different models which should help with this in getting us even better models that deal with this problem. So currently you guys have helped us find a problem in astronomies current view of the milky way, and hopefully will help us really understand what the milky way looks like. So while we may not be very fast in upgrading hardware, we're at least doing some astronomy here :P Computer science too - we've just submitted a paper to this year's PPAM (parallel processing and applied mathematics) conference describing the GPU work, which I should be making a link available to everyone as soon as it's accepted. I'm sorry that the server issues go unattended for so long, but we don't have anyone really doing the networking. It's just me in my spare time (which i have none of right now while i'm finishing writing my phd thesis). Before we had Dave to work on that but he's graduated and we haven't found another undergraduate student to work on this yet. Hopefully next semester we'll have another one. We're in the process of ordering new hardware which should improve the performance of the server, but it will be a couple weeks before it gets here, and probably another week or two before we've updated all the server side code to work on multiple CPUs.--Travis

More... (http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/all_news.php#226)