"We are introducing one of the most extensive systems of user statistics in the distributed computing world," said Alex Beckley, theSkyNet web developer. As members earn credits and climb up the rankings, they accumulate unique trophies and rewards as an incentive to participate.Īs part of its second anniversary celebrations, TheSkyNet has developed a whole new range of trophies for its members, as well as adding the images of the galaxies they have processed to the website, which users can download as part of individual galaxy reports showing their contribution. TheSkyNet members earn credits as they process data, either individually or as part of alliance. T2 also sees a raft of new features on theSkyNet's completely revised website. "Processing this amount of data with a research computer would normally take 10 years, but the way theSkyNet POGS is going we'll be done in less than three," said Vinsen. Thanks to some 3500 users, and with 50 more joining every day, theSkyNet POGS has already processed an impressive 7000 galaxies since it started testing and as the number of computers in the project grows with its official integration into the website, the team behind it aims to process over 100,000 galaxies. "Today marks the official launch of theSkyNet POGS, and its integration into theSkyNet's main website, where users can now view their stats, as well as the stunning galaxy images their computer has helped process," said theSkyNet Project Scientist Kevin Vinsen. TheSkyNet POGS is the first-ever Australian project to be available to the public on the popular distributed computing software BOINC. TheSkyNet Pan-STARRS1 Optical Galaxy Survey, or theSkyNet POGS, processes data gathered by various telescopes around the globe to measure the properties of thousands of galaxies, such as stellar mass and star formation rate. At members can view the credits they've earned by processing data, trophies they've been awarded as part of their contribution, the actual galaxies they've processed data from and can join alliances to process together.Īs part of T2, theSkyNet is also officially launching a new scientific project – theSkyNet POGS, which started testing almost a year ago. Today theSkyNet launches T2 – Transform 2 – a new version of its website that brings new citizen science and membership features. Launched on September 13th 2011, theSkyNet is a community computing project dedicated to astronomy, initiated by the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Western Australia.īy using the idle processing power of thousands of computers connected to the Internet, theSkyNet simulates a powerful single machine and processes data collected by telescopes around the world. TheSkyNet is celebrating its two year anniversary today with the official launch of a new research project, as well as a range of improvements and new features to make contributing to astronomical research at home more enjoyable, and even easier. view moreĬredit: Image Credit: Kevin Vinsen, ICRAR and Dave Thilker, Johns Hopkins University. This processed image shows how fast stars are forming the galaxy, with the bright orange and white areas where many stars are forming and the darker areas where fewer are forming. I can try and answer any questions anyone has in this thread - I'm sure there'll be some.Image: An image of galaxy M100 processed by theSkyNet POGS volunteers. The community here has always been a good one. I'm glad to have been able to help manage this project, even if it's only been one day a week for the most part. Kevin and I do appreciate everything you've done, and we'll be sure to put all the data to good use. Thank you everyone for your contributions, great or small. So I'm sorry about how abrupt this is, but we're all done. This is mainly due to monetary issues - it costs more than $2,000 AUD per month to keep the POGS and theSkyNet services running. The POGS and theSkyNet websites are going to remain up for the time being, but Kevin is also looking to shut them down once everything has fully wrapped up. We'll have a gigantic amount of training data ready for this task, so the prospects of positive results seem high.Īdditionally, any research papers that ICRAR publishes using this data will contain an acknowledgement to the work done by everyone who contributed to POGS. Kevin tells me that the next step is to use the processed galaxy data to train an auto-encoder neural network to classify galaxies based on their features. Next up, we'll be looking at reviewing all of the processed galaxy data and preparing it for actual use. I've been told by Kevin this morning that POGS has finished processing all the galaxies he needs. As a lot of you noticed, there haven't been any workunits for POGS for about a week.
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