Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute says MilkyWay@Home distributed computing project outpaces most supercomputers with processing power
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which got the MilkyWay@Home distributed computing project going back in 2006, now says that the petaflop-plus processing power of the research project now beats that of the second fastest supercomputer and is second only to Folding@home among distributed computing programs in terms of speed.
MilkyWay@Home is one of dozens of ongoing distributed computing projects that enable complex research into all sorts of issues by harnessing the extra computing power from volunteers around the world. Like many of the other projects, MilkyWay@Home is based on open source BOINC software.
According to RPI:
The galactic computing project had very humble beginnings, according to Heidi Newberg, associate professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy at Rensselaer. Her personal research to map the three-dimensional distribution of stars and matter in the Milky Way using data from the extensive Sloan Digital Sky Survey could not find the best model to map even a small section of a single galactic star stream in any reasonable amount of time.
“I was a researcher sitting in my office with a very big computational problem to solve and very little personal computational power or time at my fingertips,” Newberg said. “Working with the MilkyWay@Home platform, I now have the opportunity to use a massive computational resource that I simply could not have as a single faculty researcher, working on a single research problem.”
RPI says nine articles and multiple talks have resulted from the findings attributable to discoveries made using MilkyWay@Home’s processing power.
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