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MilkyWay@Home and Volunteer Computing at RPI

Learn about MilkyWay@Home, a volunteer computing project that models the Milky Way. This article discusses the use of GPUs for faster processing and provides statistics on active users and hosts. It also explores the mapping of the Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Stream and the development of the BOINC platform.

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MilkyWay@Home and Volunteer Computing at RPI

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  1. MilkyWay@Home andVolunteer Computing at RPI • Travis Desell • RCOS, April 23, 2010

  2. MilkyWay@Home & Open Source Software • Milky Way Modeling Application • Multi-Platform Development: ATI, CUDA, OpenCL, Windows, OS X, Linux • Generic Optimization Code (in the works) • BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

  3. MilkyWay@Home Statistics • ~20,000 active users • ~30,000 active hosts • ~1.6 petaflops: • most powerful BOINC project • 3rd most powerful computing system (behind Folding@Home and the fastest supercomputer) • most of this from GPU computing

  4. Courtesy of http://www.boincstats.com

  5. MilkyWay@Home GPU Application • First GPU implementation was user-contributed • Compared to 3.0Ghz AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 940: • ATI HD5870 GPU - 109x speedup • NVidia GeForce GTX 285 GPU - 17x speedup • Requires double-precision calculations: • NVidia GPUs have less double precision real estate • Application would be 6.2x faster on the ATI GPU, 7.8x faster on the NVidia GPU using single-precision math Travis Desell, Anthony Waters, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Matthew Newby, Heidi Newberg, Andreas Przystawik and Dave Anderson. Accelerating the MilkyWay@Home volunteer computing project with GPUs. In the 8th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2009), Wroclaw, Poland, September 2009.

  6. The Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Stream • The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy is merging with the Milky Way • The dwarf is being tidally disrupted by the Milky Way, creating long “tails.” Image (below): David Martinez-Delgado (MPIA) & Gabriel Perez (IAC) Image (above): [Ibata et al. 1997, AJ] Mapping the Tidal Stream will: • Provide information on matter distribution in Milky Way • Provide constraints on Galactic Halo

  7. SLOAN Digital Sky Survey Image: sdss.org • 230+ million objects • 8,400 square degrees in the sky • Large percentage of north galactic cap • Very little data in galactic plane (too much dust) • Several hundred thousand stars

  8. Halo Bulge Thin Disk Thick Disk Data Wedge Sun Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy Tidal Stream ~30 kiloparsecs (100,000 light-years) The Milky Way Image: Matthew Newby

  9. Sagittarius Stream Model • Assume stream is a cylinder • Radial drop-off given by a Gaussian Distribution • 2 background parameters (new model has 4): • r0, q • 6 parameters per stream: • ε, μ, r, θ, φ, σ Background distribution: • A single stream with the old model has an 8 dimensional search space • Often fit multiple streams for search spaces with more than 20 dimensions!

  10. BOINC • Active development mailing lists: • boinc_dev@ssl.berkeley.edu • boinc_projects@ssl.berkeley.edu • boinc_alpha@ssl.berkeley.edu • Client Development: • Supporting different architectures (GPUs) • Awarding fair “credit” for work done • Server Development: • Scheduling • Validation & Verification

  11. DNA@Home • Find protein binding sites using Gibbs sampling • Use random walks (Markov chains) which result in sites distributed according to their actual probability of being the correct binding site • Initial sequences: • Mycobacterium tuberculosis • Yersinia pestis (cause of the Bubonic plague)

  12. Participate • http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu : astro@cs.rpi.edu • http://dnahome.cs.rpi.edu : dna@cs.rpi.edu • http://boinc.berkeley.edu

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