news from orbit@home

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Ed and Harriet Griffith
Ed and Harriet ...
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17 Jun 2005 3:16:22 UTC
Topic 189363
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    located at http://orbit.psi.edu/
    June 16, 2005
    After less than one day, more than 100 user accounts created! Also still having problems with slashes in urls, we are working on that. As a reminder, we don't have any BOINC application yet, and the scheduler is not running, so the BOINC client will bounce off the orbit@home website without much work to do for now. Update: now the scheduler is running, the BOINC client should be able to connect, ask for work, and then disconnect because there is no work available. The client can also complain for "platform 'x-y-z' not found": this is because there is not an application available yet.

    June 15, 2005
    orbit@home website (re)-started! After a first test website yesterday, we decided to go directly with the BOINC website. This allows a uniform users management, and makes many other tasks a lot easier. User accounts can be created now, and we will disable it as soon as we will reach a user base of at least one thousand users, sufficient for the alpha testing phase. At this moment, the application is not yet ready for alpha testing. We will announce here the development news and the beginning of the testing phase.


    Gary Roberts
    Gary Roberts
    Moderator
    Joined: 9 Feb 05
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    news from orbit@home

    17 Jun 2005 9:00:06 UTC
    Message 12614
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      Yes, it's actually not a bad looking project and it seems to be filling up with alpha testers quite quickly. I think there would be near 250 or so now as it was well over 200 a few hours ago. Quite funny when they still don't have a science app to alpha test just yet. Probably not too far away though.

      The BOINC side of things, including the message boards, seems to be working fairly well now and there is a surprising volume of posts already in the first two days. Obviously a lot of people will want to know what the project is all about so here is a description straight from the horses mouth :).

      Quote:


      What is Orbit@Home?

      Let's start with this easy question. Orbit@home is a project based on BOINC and ORSA, monitoring the orbit of all the asteroids passing near the Earth. Every time a new asteroid is discovered or re-observed, the orbit of the asteroid is updated and propagated in future to check for possible impacts with the Earth.

      As bigger and better telescopes are built, the number of orbits to update every day increases, so more computing power is needed in order to do it. It is at this point that the distributed computing philosophy enters and helps doing the work. The basic idea is the following: each different client can work with the data relative to a single asteroid, because there is no correlation between asteroids (excluding extremely rare cases, like asteroid-asteroid impact or gravitational perturbation; both these cases can be handled in an improved version of orbit@home). If the number of clients available is greater than the number of orbits to update (times a redundancy factor), it is possible in principle to update all the orbits in the same time needed by a single computer to update a single orbit. This is what makes the orbit@home project so appealing.

      Pasquale Tricarico -- Project Architect

      Cheers,
      Gary.

      Juerschi
      Juerschi
      Joined: 4 Jan 05
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      RE: [qoute]June 17,

      18 Jun 2005 0:53:38 UTC
      Message 12615
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        Quote:

        [qoute]June 17, 2005
        Two days and more than 400 users. Orbit@home is becoming now a real community, with people interested in Distributed Computing, Astronomy and Asterodis. Now that all the server problems seem to be fixed, we will enhance the website in gereral, adding a description of this project and also introducing the users to the Science related to Minor Planets in the Solar System. Everybody is invited to contribute, sending or posting to the forum possible orbit@home logos, graphics, related websites and everything can help building the orbit@home image and identity.

        Now they have over 400 users in just two days. So, hurry up.


        Oddsodz
        Oddsodz
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        I am in. Ready to bea slave

        18 Jun 2005 3:33:40 UTC
        Message 12616
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          I am in. Ready to bea slave to the Super Net CPU

          Fuzzy Hollynoodles
          Fuzzy Hollynoodles
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          RE: news from orbit@home

          20 Jun 2005 14:51:35 UTC
          Message 12617
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            gravywavy
            gravywavy
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            Looks like they will hit 1000

            21 Jun 2005 19:09:59 UTC
            Message 12618
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              Looks like they will hit 1000 users tonite

              If you want in on the alpha testing, join soon before they close the gates.

              (that was _g_ates, not _G_ates)

              ~~gravywavy

              Skip Da Shu
              Skip Da Shu
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              RE: Looks like they will

              21 Jun 2005 19:38:03 UTC
              Message 12619 in response to message 12618
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                Quote:

                Looks like they will hit 1000 users tonite

                If you want in on the alpha testing, join soon before they close the gates.

                (that was _g_ates, not _G_ates)


                Yea, I am 899 and joined about 1pm CDT (GMT-5)

                Udo
                Udo
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                ...got it! "993"

                22 Jun 2005 8:26:14 UTC
                Message 12620
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                  ...got it!
                  "993"

                  Udo

                  gravywavy
                  gravywavy
                  Joined: 22 Jan 05
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                  RE: If you want in on the

                  22 Jun 2005 21:04:39 UTC
                  Message 12621 in response to message 12618
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                    Quote:

                    If you want in on the alpha testing, join soon before they close the gates.

                    yep: now closed, last one in had an id of 1036 as the doorkeeping was manual rather than automatic.

                    Many thanks to those earlier in this thread whose posts let me know about the project, I am really chuffed to be in at the pre-alpha...

                    ~~gravywavy

                    gravywavy
                    gravywavy
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                    More volunteers will be

                    25 Jun 2005 8:35:50 UTC
                    Message 12622
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                      More volunteers will be wanted again for beta testing once alpha is complete, and the project is asking disappointed volunteers to check progress at http://orbit.psi.edu/create_account_form.php around November 2005

                      ~~gravywavy

                      Desti
                      Desti
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                      September 9, 2005 First

                      9 Sep 2005 16:11:06 UTC
                      Message 12623
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                        September 9, 2005
                        First application now available, for the i686-pc-linux-gnu platform only. We are generating WUs, and of course we are noticing a lot of problems, as expected. Please report any problem, using the forums.

                        http://orbit.psi.edu

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