MilkyWay@home

MilkyWay @ home is a distributed computing project at the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The aim of the project is to create a highly accurate 3D computer model of the Milky Way, where the data are used, which were detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The research on the one hand focuses on the Astro computer science and on the other to the general computer science.

The project was officially launched in July 2007. The basis of the calculations is the BOINC software from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, there are applications for 32- bit and 64 -bit Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. To be able to use the computing power of the GPU, there is a running on graphics cards of the GeForce 200 and more recent series, CUDA applications for 32 -bit Windows and 64 -bit Linux, as well as applications for AMD GPUs.

In September 2010, another project named MilkyWay @ Home N- Body Simulation has been added.