Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

TheGoblinPopper t1_itmgfc5 wrote

Asteroids@home is like SETI but for mapping the entire asteroid belt and known bodies.

You can use BOINC to dedicate processing power to it on your laptops or phones if you wanted to.

55

carlitos_moreno t1_itovfkr wrote

I've been wondering if I use a computer that's too old (and too slow), would it slow then down rather than help?

5

Latexi95 t1_itoxc3b wrote

No. These kind of works take months to calculate in total and are split into millions of smaller tasks that are then distributed to all devices. Your computer will just calculate as many small parts as it can. It gets new assignment when it has completed one small part of the calculation.

13

dan_dares t1_itpavlr wrote

and each chunk is checked a few times, so it all helps!

5

TheGoblinPopper t1_itoz1c5 wrote

To add on to what u/latexi95 said, the work units you get are hours of processing and you are usually given around 4-7 days to complete it. Once completed and on wifi, your PC will send the completed units back to the project automatically.

Astroids@home was something I used to crunch on my old android phone in 2015 or so, that hopefully can give you an idea of how simple the work units can be.

BOINC is actually pretty smart, and it will check your hardware before it sends anything, so if there are GPU focused work units vs CPU focused one it will check before they are sent.

7

iqisoverrated t1_itpas66 wrote

It helps. The way this works is that you download a small packet to work on and then it sends the results back and gets the next packet (also there is redundancy in case someone doesn't send a packet back for a long time for whatever reason it gets distributed to someone else)

There's no need for reacting to asteroids "on a second's notice" (that's the whole point of doing this, really), so whether you work on each packet for an hour or a day makes no difference. With a slower computer you'll just go through less packets per day.

Consider that once a dangerous asteroid is detected it will take months/years to get a deflection mission launched - so a day or a week of 'delay' on the processing side isn't going to affect anything.

2

really_random_user t1_itpcc08 wrote

Wouldn't slow them down, but might not be worthwhile, a phone based option may be better

1