news from orbit@home

Ed and Harriet Griffith
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Topic 189363

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
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news from orbit@home

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
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RE: [qoute]June 17,

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
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I am in. Ready to bea slave

I am in. Ready to bea slave to the Super Net CPU

Fuzzy Hollynoodles
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RE: news from orbit@home

gravywavy
gravywavy
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Looks like they will hit 1000

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

Message 12619 in response to message 12618

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"

...got it!
"993"

Udo

gravywavy
gravywavy
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RE: If you want in on the

Message 12621 in response to message 12618

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

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

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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