Milkyway@home.

[vaio]

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

About MilkyWay@home

Milkyway@home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do reserach in modeling and determining the evolution of the Milkyway galaxy.

[russkris]

Interestin.... Nice find

[umccullough]

Been running this for a bit now on my Windows x86-64 system - and the WUs tend to crash every once in a while (usually during times of heavy disk activity).

[glennpat]

I have been running on this for over two months and it been working really well. Except for a couple of short periods the work has been steady. There are currently 19 teams crunching over 10,000 credits a day with 3 averaging over 100,000 credits a day.

I does have a max of 20 work units per host at a time. Work units take around 5 minutes each depending on the computer speed.

[fractal]

I have been running MilkyWay off and on for several months. It is a fixed credit project that went from too much credit to too little credit and is now somewhere in the middle. It has 64 bit as well as 32 bit clients and the 64 bit clients are noticably faster which for a fixed credit project is a big advantage.

[russkris]

OK.. come one come all... lets find out what this project is doing and get it added...

[fractal]

It is like you said, you can't get anyone to say anything ahead of time, and you only hear when things go wrong.

MilkyWay has had a fairly steady stream of work for the past couple of months. The work units are fast (under 15 minutes on any hardware I have) and plentiful. There is, as has been said, a 20 WU limit which has you connecting to the server fairly often.

Their server seems to run out of disc space sporadically which brings the project down until they run cleanup, but the admins are responsive and get it taken care of.

I think this is a worthwhile project that would make a good addition to the vault.

[MechWarrior]

Hey all, been running this project for about 2 weeks now. running on some windows XP and linux systems with no problems......

[KAMCOBILL]

It's been running steady since November Stats (http://www.xgrubberskickass.com/php/Teams/Milkyway@Home.php) .

[Gunslinger]

I think this 20 unit limit per host is not very well thought out. :confused:

Coupled with the 20 minute communication deferral caused by hitting that limit it could be an issue on modern dual quad Xeon systems.

e.g. on a C2D quad (Q6600) @ 2.4GHz the units take about 8 minutes on each core (i.e. 4 WU every 8 minutes) so there are still some left after 20 minutes. A similar speed dual Harpertown (e.g. 2 x E5410 @ 2.33 or 2 x E5420 @ 2.50) would be starving at least four of the cores after 20 minutes... :o


Until they implement a WU limit based on the number of cores in the host (or on throughput?) I wouldn't advise running this as the sole project on a dual quad.

:gunsling:

[russkris]

Thanks guy.. Been 5 day and very few replies, so on your good info I will add the project.. So no complaining about the time it takes or doesn't take to add projects

[fractal]

The curse is broken. The curse is broken! 60 days of regular work, two weeks of it after being vaulted.

Crunch, crunch. Good job Rusty.

[russkris]

Really we actually get to leave a project in the Vault...?