|
May 9, 2008
The website is mostly up right now, but I'm still ironing out some bugs having to do with logging in. The project daemons seems to be up and running but I haven't verified that they are working properly yet. More updates to come.
May 8, 2008
Project will be going down later on today. Since we'll be doing OS updates, the web server will also be down.
May 5, 2008
On Thursday, May 8, we will be bringing down the server for most of the day to perform the maintainence we previous mentioned.
April 20, 2008
Early next month, we plan on performing some major maintainence on our server hardware which will require that we shut down the server for a number of hours. We'll give a more specific date around that time, but we thought you all would appreciate the heads up.
April 7, 2008
We're finished with the database maintainence for now. Some more may be required tomorrow as well, if the database keeps acting up.
April 7, 2008
Since CAMB sans lensing seems to be much, MUCH faster than CAMB with lensing, we're temporarily lowered the credit again to 50, which still is pretty high, just not ridiculous like it is now.
April 7, 2008
The scheduler will be down for a little while while we tool around with the database in order to fix the slow query issue.
April 5, 2008
A message to Cosmology@Home users
April 5, 2008
We've been working on the server for the past week every day trying to get the server back to an acceptable state. However, the database has been extremely stubborn in going back to normal. We will continue to work on it *every day* until it's 100% right, so please don't think that we are unaware or or ignoring the problems.
April 4, 2008
The database activity has finally gone down to an acceptable level, so we've restarted the project daemons.
April 2, 2008
Due to the flux in workunits that has been taking place recently, there's quite a lot of strain on the database. So, until the validator and the other daemons are caught up on their work, we aren't going to send out any more WUs. We'll restart the scheduler as soon as it's done. Thank you for your patience.
April 1, 2008
The database appears to be up and working again. To learn more about the issues, read this post.
March 31, 2008
We are experiencing some problems with our mysql server which started at some point over the weekend. I am currently working on it and will post as soon as I have it up again.
March 26, 2008
Despite temporarily disabling the lensing component of CAMB, the results are still very useful to us, so please don't worry that your time here at Cosmology@Home is wasted.
March 26, 2008
Until we fix CAMB's lensing component, we will be temporarily lowering credit granted to all WUs from 100 to 80.
March 20, 2008
It seems that the WUs in the queue right now will not run correctly, so we are going to cancel all of the current WUs and give credit to the WUs which have already been completed. Then, we will enable the new WU generator. Make sure to update your BOINC client so that you don't accidentally crunch WUs that have been canceled.
March 19, 2008
The project is now back up and running. The generator will be down for a bit until we run down the available WUs, but then the new generator will kick in.
March 18, 2008
We are suspending WU generation until the "Rombint" errors are solved and a new generator is up and running.
March 15, 2008
The server is back up after cleaning out the old versions of CAMB that are no longer being used.
March 14, 2008
CAMB 2.12 has been released and now correctly resolves the output filenames to prevent "cannot rename output file" errors.
March 11, 2008
If you are experiencing problems with CAMB 2.10 and below, abort those WUs and get the newest version of CAMB, 2.11
January 24, 2008
An update about the current server situation is here.
January 24, 2008
Note that between today and tomorrow, the site URL might change between "www.cosmologyathome.org" and "cosmologyathome.org", although they are more or less equivalent. Tomorrow night, it should stay permanently at the former one. Sorry for any confusion this may cause.
January 24, 2008
There have been a lot of problems caused by the move across servers, mostly caused by complications with apache and the BOINC client. I've spent most of my day working on a solution, which I will outline here.
January 18, 2008
On the coming Wednesday (1/23/2008), we will be performing some server maintenence at 5 PM CST (11 PM UTC). The server may be down for a period of a couple of hours, but I'll try to get it back up and running ASAP.
December 26, 2007
Cosmology@Home, as well as moderator JRenkar and user KSMarksPsych, was mentioned in this Chicago Tribune article, which ran yesterday. Great job to everybody and thanks for making Cosmology@Home a success!
December 16, 2007
We've made a small change to the work generator parameters which may affect the run-time of upcoming workunits. Don't be alarmed if WUs created after the 15th take a bit more or less to complete.
December 10, 2007
It looks like the server is handing out work again. The problem was that the feeder was trying to hand out only the oldest work, which wouldn't allow the newer, faster machines to get anything. Now it should be up and running correctly.
December 3, 2007
Chad just submitted our first paper using results from Cosmology@Home. It will appear on the online astrophysics archive at astro-ph/0712.0194 and we will also submit it to the Astrophysical Journal. The paper describes Pico, a machine learning tool for cosmology. Pico is speed in a bottle. Pico extracts the essence of the quadrillions of CPU cycles of Cosmology@Home and enables other cosmologists to speed up their calculations by a factor of 250,000. You can have a sneak preview by clicking on papers on the new Pico homepage. You might like to have a look at the acknowledgement section at the end where we mention 5 crunchers from Cosmology@Home as representatives of all our users.
November 22, 2007
Congratulations everyone: we have entered the top 10 most active BOINC projects in the world according to BOINCstats! This is with less than 3000 users world-wide. We are Project of the Month at BOINC Synergy, Free-DC, and L'Alliance Francophone, plus our top team AMDUsers are running a week-long race on Cosmology@Home!
November 14, 2007
We just fixed the server's clock so that it's no longer fast. However, this has the side-effect of making it impossible to post for the next 7 or so hours. In the mean time, we've also fixed the file uploader, so it looks like almost everything is back up and running.
November 14, 2007
We are back! We just recovered from a hardware failure which caused the downtime for the last few days. Cosmology@Home is back online, running on a new server. Once the old server is repaired we will have a fully redundant system, which will avoid downtime due to hardware failure.
Since we already had a fully redundant disk setup none of the science data was lost. Everyone will get credit for the work they did. Please give us some time (a few days to a week) to sort through the credit issue. If some WU expired before you were able to upload the results we will have to intervene manually to make sure you get the credit you deserve.
Happy crunching! We have some lost time to make up for!
October 26, 2007
From this point on, Cosmology@Home is now in the beta testing phase! For more, read this thread on the message boards.
October 23, 2007
Testing for the new, stand-alone CAMB app will start today at 5 PM. This version will implement progress indication, as well as relieve our independence on the wrapper app. Go here for more information.
September 18, 2007
The new website design is now up and running. Please post any bugs and other issues in the message boards. Some of you may be concerned that the website is too narrow, so we are working on an option to increase the width of the content window, which should be available soon.
September 10, 2007
Cosmology@Home will be down for a couple of hours while we perform server maintenance related to the vast number of errors we've been seeing for the past couple of hours. I'll be sure to notify everyone when we're back up.
August 22, 2007
For those who can't wait until Beta begins, we have opened up registration for the current Alpha stage of Cosmology@Home. Registration through the boinc client is still disabled, so go to the account creation page for more information.
August 14, 2007
The new URL for Cosmology@Home is www.cosmologyathome.org. The old URL will still work to ensure there aren't any problems.
August 10, 2007
The server is working again after a restart. Sory for the down-time.
August 7, 2007
The test application is now non-beta, so the "Run test applications" option no longer needs to be enabled in the project preferences. Sorry for the confusion.
August 7, 2007
We are going to start testing a new version of CAMB that does not require a wrapper application to run. This app should eventually fix a number of issues with progress indication and checkpointing. It should be noted that this test app is currently only working for Linux, finishes in about a minute, and will grant 0 credit upon completion.
July 31, 2007
The server is back up after a couple of hours of downtime.
July 23, 2007
All of the faulty WUs from the weekend should be gone now, so please do not abort any more WUs with the intention of not crunching bad results.
July 19, 2007
We have released version 1.22 of our CAMB app today, which implements a checkpointing system. Along with the new application come longer WUs, wihch should take several hours to complete and will grant more credits per completed result. More information
July 6, 2007
The performance gap between the Windows and Linux versions of CAMB has been eliminated due to the release of a new, recompiled version of Win32 CAMB. Granted credits may be slightly lowered to compensate.
June 29, 2007
On Monday, we'll be implementing a fixed-credit system for all WUs. Ideally, this will take care of multiple issues we have been experiencing with granted credits in recent days.
June 18, 2007
Benjamin Wandelt, the head of our research group here at the University of Illinois, has written a letter to the users of Cosmology@Home. In the letter, Ben explains the scientific background behind the projects as well as the actual contribution individual users will be making to Cosmolgy.
June 12, 2007
The last batch of test WUs took as long as 4 hours each to complete, so we've created a new set which should last somewhere between 8 and 20 minutes. I'll be creating new WUs all this week to test out minor changes being made to CAMB.
June 11, 2007
New test WUs are available, although these are considerably different than the last set of test WUs. Whereas previous WUs ran for about 15-30 seconds, these should run for about an hour. We are making a relatively small batch of WUs to see how well these work.
June 8, 2007
The project will be down for a while until we can make the necessary upgrades to our server and application. We will not be creating any more WUs until the test next week.
June 8, 2007
Thanks to everybody for such a tremendous showing of support for testing Cosmology@Home. I've had more than enough requests to help with testing at this point, so for now, registration is closed again.
Thanks again for all of those who volunteered to help test our project!
June 8, 2007
I've been receiving a lot of questions about the scientific reasoning behind Cosmology@Home; specifically, you want to know what our application does and how that fits into the grand scheme of Cosmology.
Dr. Benjamin Wandelt, the head of the research group that is hosting Cosmology@Home, is working on explaining exactly that as a part of the current redesign of his website aimed at accomodating our BOINC project. I'm sorry that we don't already have one, but it seems that the technical progress on Cosmology@Home is outpacing the other efforts. As soon as Ben has finished, I'll post a link and make an announcement.
May 23, 2007
How so many people have found out about Cosmology@Home this early into development is still a mystery to me, but I'm not complaining! At this point, Cosmology@Home is still in the pre-alpha stage; therefore, I have disabled account creation until I can get everything up and running. As soon as we're up, though, registration will be opened and we'll be off!
March 31, 2007
Cosmology@Home is currently in the pre-alpha phase. Expect us to be up-and-running soon!
If you have any questions or comments regarding the content of this site, please contact the Webmaster