Dear participants,

After the last set of updates a couple of years ago and with some hardware purchases the C@H site and the server are now running smoothly and stably. The high-precision outputs you are computing have been key in the day-to-day operations of extracting cosmological information from the Planck data. While we can still use these outputs for further analyses, the last Planck team publications have just appeared in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a professional journal for front-line, peer-reviewed research.

In fact, the updates I mentioned (led by Marius Millea) have made it possible to use the C@H platform for new kinds of cosmology projects. And we have plenty of ideas for new applications.

As a hint of what’s coming, have a look at this blog post that describes a new method we just published for simulating the non-linear formation of structures in the universe today. This is a much more challenging problem than what C@H is doing right now (which is to predict the properties of structure in the extremely early universe, where the much simpler linear theory works. In some ways the early universe is much easier to model than the universe today!). The main innovation in our paper is that we've found a way to split this very large computation into a very large number of much smaller pieces, making it possible for the first time to think about running such a non-linear simulation on C@H.

We are still working out the details but it looks like we will be able to set up C@H to run a very large---truly planet-scale---simulation of structure formation in the universe using all our participants’ computers distributed across the earth.

The main limitation we have at the moment is people to implement these ideas and actually make this happen. I am working on this and will keep you updated.

Thank you again for your continued support of cosmology@home.

Best regards,

Ben Wandelt

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Creator of Cosmology@Home

That is excellent news, and a good use of BOINC. But when you are ready, you should post a notice in the Projects section of the BOINC forum.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_forum.php?id=11