 Team
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Planet Quest
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PlanetQuest Collaboratory: The Next Generation of Distributed Computing So you have searched for little green men, crunched the primes, helped cure some life threatening diseases, predicted climate change, worked on physics, astronomy and earth sciences. You even helped make a map of the Milky Way Galaxy and have done enough mathematical calculations to keep the math club of the local high school busy sharpening pencils for 17,000 years.
Now you are bored with BOINC on Planet Earth. Here is a simple solution, use your computer to Find A New Planet.
With a new Distributed Computing Program called PlanetQuest, you can use your computer to find a planet of your very own. The program will work with NASA and JPL Kepler data and will run under BOINC. Unlike many BOINC Projects, this one will let you select many variables and search for exoplanets and extrasolar objects, and you can control the search and the program will look to the area of space that you specify. It is designed to be interactive and allows you to run your own experiments. Yes. You can run your own Astronomy Experiments! You can change the variables, searches and data as you like. Want to look for asteroids? Comets? Gravitational events? The basic algorithms for this are at your control and built into the PlanetQuest Collaboratory program. If the project is released as stated, this will be a state of the art, next generation BOINC project.
The PlanetQuest program is currently in development, and it has not been released to the public.
For those of you who don't get out much... Yes Martha! There are several other planets. In recent years, 362 new planets have been identified. For those of you who really don't get out, but need to, they scratched Pluto off the list. The primary scientific project for these discoveries is the NASA / JPL Kepler Mission. Other Earth based optical telescopes & the Keck Interferometer is used to combines the light of the world's largest optical telescopes.
Kepler has been in orbit just over one year and was launched on March 6, 2009. More information on PlanetQuest, NASA JPL, Kepler & The Keck Interferometer is detailed below with links to the respective project webs.
From The PlanetQuest Web
The PlanetQuest Collaboratory will turn your computer (Mac, PC, Linux, and others) into a virtual astronomical observatory that you can use to make and share real scientific discoveries. You can classify stars no one has cataloged before, use the Collaboratory to do your own research, and maybe even find a new planet! We have done a significant amount of work developing and testing the Collaboratory. We have compiled a star catalog for planet searching, with about two million observations. We also have half the transit detection algorithms running on the BOINC platform. We are close to releasing a limited alpha test but for the general release beta test we will need significant additional funding to provide the infrastructure to be able to handle the large response we expect.
For more information and a preview - visit URL: http://www.planetquest.org/download
Current Status: Development and Alpha Testing
Editors Note: I have scheduled an interview with the PlanetQuest Program Director, and will write a follow up on this exciting new BOINC Project in the April Edition of the Team Newsletter.
From The NASA & JPL Kepler Mission Web
NASA & JPL Searching for Earthlike Worlds
Are we alone? For centuries, human beings have
pondered this question. Medieval scholars speculated that other worlds must
exist and that some would harbor other forms of life. In our time, advances
in science and technology have brought us to the threshold of finding an
answer to this timeless question.
The recent discovery of numerous planets around stars other than the sun confirms that our solar system is not unique. Indeed, these exoplanets appear to be common in our galactic neighborhood. The exoplanets we have discovered so far are giants, like Jupiter and Saturn. They are unlikely to support life as we know it. But some of these planetary systems might also contain smaller, terrestrial planets like Mars and Earth. Over the next 15 years, NASA is embarking on a bold series of missions to find and characterize new worlds. These will be the most sensitive instruments ever built, capable of reaching beyond the bounds of our own solar system. The Keck Interferometer combines the light of the world's largest optical telescopes, extending our vision to new distances. Using a technique known as interferometry, the Keck will study dust clouds around stars where Earthlike planets may be forming.
NASA's Kepler Mission, scheduled to launch in 2009, will survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets. It will tell us whether planets like Earth are common or rare in our galaxy.
Terrestrial Planet Finder will build upon the legacy of all that have gone before it. With an imaging power 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope, the Terrestrial Planet Finder observatories will provide the first photographs of nearby planetary systems. We will analyze the atmospheres of these distant worlds, looking for carbon dioxide, water and ozone. The substantial presence of all three gasses would suggest that life is present.
Such a discovery would at last provide convincing evidence that we are not alone.
We will have found another Earth?
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| Cool BOINC Science
Video Submitted By Top Viking - March Edition Source United BOINC & You Tube |
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Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move. It's all relative...
The LHC has recently returned to operational status and is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. A video giving a tour of the LHC (underground accelerator) at CERN. Measuring 27km in circumference, the LHC is the world's largest particle accelerator.
As concerns of a global hunger crises mount, IBM and researchers at the University of Washington today launched a new program to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and more nutritious yields. Anyone with a computer and the Internet can help by joining World Community Grid at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org
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LHC@Home -
The Large Hadron Collider Submitted By Top Viking - March Edition |
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LHC@home
Project News 04.03.2010 12:10 GMT
Two LHC Announcements:
2. LHC@home is also back. After a long quiet period we have new studies to work on. The executable has been updated (which is why there is not a Linux version available yet) and the project is now crunching simulations for the LHC upgrade. The team at CERN are working on the Linux executable and the team at QMUL are looking at the server code and are hoping to update that soon. This is all I will say for the moment. However LHC@home is being used for beam studies from the LHC machine running actual data from the experiments is unlikely as the code has been written for the grid and the datasets are measured in 100s of gigabytes. We have been looking into other LHC uses for the project but it is not easy. Later days, Neasan
Project URL: http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/
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QMC@Home
Submitted By Top Viking - March Edition |
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Quantum Monte Carlo at Home QMC News -
Mar 4, 2010 -
Our new application QASINO is
ready to run!
About QMC
Summary: Reactions between molecules are important for virtually all parts of our lives. The structure and reactivity of molecules can be predicted by Quantum Chemistry, but the solution of the vastly complex equations of Quantum Theory often requires huge amounts of computing power. In our project we want to acquire the necessary computing time to further develop the very promising Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for general use in Quantum Chemistry.
QMC - URL: http://qah.uni-muenster.de/index.php
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| Distributed
Computing News Links Submitted By Top Viking - March Edition |
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| External Links - Source Distributed Computing News URL:
http://distributedcomputing.info/news.html
Volunteering for a better world: harnessing technology and willing citizens - International Science Grid this Week - March 3, 2010
Distributed Computing Helps in AIDS - Fightmed Gadget - March 3, 2010
Two Compounds Discovered That Pave the Way for New Class of AIDS Drug; two chemical compounds discovered by fightAIDS@home make possible a completely new type of AIDS-fighting drugs. - PR Newswire - March 2, 2010
Rise of the Citizen Scientists; how distributed computing projects are enabling average people to be scientists and to contribute to scientific research. - The Tyee - March 2, 2010
Virtualization - Key for LHC physics volunteer computing; an overview of the CernVM software appliance which will allow large-scale Linux-based physics simulation experiment software to use the BOINC computing platform and volunteer computing from Windows PCs - International Science Grid this Week - February 24, 2010
Are we missing ET.'s call?; a review of SETI's progress over its 50-year history. Singularity Hub - February 22, 2010
Use Your Idle Computer Time to Save the World; an overview of World Community Grid's distributed computing projects - Singularity Hub - February 22, 2010
FightAIDS@Home with your computer; a short overview of distributed computing projects and fightAIDS@home - Chicago Now Blogs - February 19, 2010
You can help map the Milky Way galaxy; an overview of MilkyWay@home - iTWire - February 16, 2010
Six Cool Distributed Computing Projects; short and funny overviews of six distributed computing projects. - UpRoxx - February 15, 2010
Majestic-12 search engine in funding boost from eBay entrepreneur; Majestic-12 will use new funding from an eBay company to add to its infrastructure and improve website crawling and indexing times. - Birmingham Post - February 4, 2010
IBM Enlists Mickey Mouse for Smarter Planet; IBM has installed a demonstration data center at Disney's EPCOT theme park. Spare computing power from the data center supports World Community Grid projects. - IT Business Edge - January 29, 2010
Find aliens with distributed computing; a short overview of distributed computing projects and SETI@Home - Web User - January 25, 2010
You Can Run Scientific Experiments in Your Own Home; Overview of distributed computing projects. PlanetPOV - January 23, 2010
Please submit suggested links, news & information for this monthly
newsletter feature to:
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Team SETI.USA Web: www.SETIUSA.Net
For
more information on NASA's Planet Quest Mission visit URL:
