Asteroids@home project details

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Alez
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#1 Asteroids@home project details

Post by Alez »

Asteroids@home

http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/index.php

About Asteroids@home
Asteroids@home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in Asteroids@home. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

Asteroids are the most numerous objects in the solar system. So far, hundreds of thousands of asteroids are known, with hundres of new discoveries every day. Altough the total number of known asteroids is large, very little is known about the physical properties of individual objects. For a significant part of the population, only the size of the bodies is known. Other physical parameters (the shape, the rotation period, direction of the rotation axis,...) are known only for hundreds of objects.

Because asteroids have in general irregular shapes and they rotate, the amount of sunlight they scatter towards the observer varies with time. This variation of brightness with time is called a lightcurve. The shape of a lightcurve depends on the shape of asteroid and also on the viewing and illumination geometry. If a sufficient number of lightcurves observed under various geometries is collected, a unique physical model of the asteroid can be reconstucted by the lightcurve inversion method.

The project Asteroids@home was started with the aim to significanly enlarge our knowledge of physical properties of asteroids. The BOINC application uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived.

Because the photometric data from all-sky surveys are typically sparse in time, the rotation period is not directly 'visible' in the data and the huge parameter space has to be scanned to find the best solution. In such cases, the lightcurve inversion is very time-consuming and the distributed computation is the only way how to efficiently deal with photometry of hundres of thousands of asteroids. Moreover, in order to reveal biases in the method and reconstruct the real distribution of physical parameters in the asteroid population, it is necessary to process large data sets of 'synthetic' populations.
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Dirk Broer
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#2 Re: Asteroids@home project details

Post by Dirk Broer »

Some recent (2023) info about BOINC platforms and Asteroids@home. It looks like not all resources have been tapped. Feel free to comment.
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P.S. I know some combinations can't be made. e.g.: an Apple GPU on non-Apple hardware does not seem possible.
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#3 Re: Asteroids@home project details

Post by Dirk Broer »

At a certain moment earlier this week WEP-M+2 -a.k.a. Wanless- ran out of WUs for me, I just had piles of WUs to upload so I looked at the table in this thread and thought:
:think: ........"I might as well shift them to Asteroids"....... :whistle:
Well, three days later and just as many ARM systems down I know better:
:naughty: "Do not run Asteroids full-out on all cores of overclocked ARM boards". :naughty:
My Radxa Rock Pi 4B chocked on it, as did my two oldest Raspberry Pi 4B's, the 4Gb models. The Jetson Xavier did bravely manage to just plod on, but I have given it a diet of just one Asteroids WU at a time. The same I did for the Odroid-N2+ and the Jetson Nano 4GB, the Pi 400 and the Odroid-M1, that were easily to steer back into production when my connectivity problems were solved. Less so for the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, but some quick Asteroids aborts saved the day here and it could still upload the Wanless Wus.

I now have one 4GB Pi4 back to life via a USB3.0 an attached SSD but, it being an older Pi4, it wouldn't take to the UAS protocol that makes an SSD over USB3.0 so fast -I had to edit files over USB2.0 in order to disable UASP via quirk (and therefore disable TRIM) to get it to work on USB3.0.... The exact same SSDs run error-free on my Pi 400 and 8 GB Pi 4 :doh:

My still running 32-bit systems didn't even take the bait, though the old Odroid-C1 tried some SiDock with almost equal results: you just can't run it on all four cores and finish in time. :(
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scole of TSBT
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#4 Re: Asteroids@home project details

Post by scole of TSBT »

What were the symptoms, system unresponsive? They use the AVX optimization extension for intel systems. Do they use an optimization extension for ARM systems?
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Dirk Broer
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#5 Re: Asteroids@home project details

Post by Dirk Broer »

scole of TSBT wrote: Sun Apr 16, 2023 1:09 pmWhat were the symptoms, system unresponsive? They use the AVX optimization extension for intel systems. Do they use an optimization extension for ARM systems?
None that I am aware off...
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Miklos M
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#6 Re: Asteroids@home project details

Post by Miklos M »

It is not very rewarding in terms of points, if I remember right.
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