Project Overview

[Dingo]

Project Motivation:

In particular in aerospace sciences simulation and optimization are major tasks to minimize structure weight, to maximize thrust or todetermine system reliability. These numerical tasks need a high level of resources and hardware-support and Constellation platform offers distributed computing power to projects from professionals to students to solve their problems in an adequate time without the need to maintain their own super-computer or cluster system. In this way it is possible to get access to the needed computingpower by a wider range of researchers who wouldn't have been ableto create those resources because of financial, administration and operation or because of bureaucracy reasons. Constellation's goal is to expedite fundamental and applicable research and bonding researchers with citizen scientists and public

Project Implementation:

As a DGLR (german aerospace society) academic student team at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, we set up a distributed super-computer that offers computing power by idle single desktop computers of volunteers connected via the internet. This accumulated computing power is provided to aerospace research purposes, that universities and private research institutions and projects normally can't afford. With this approach we demonstrate the capability of synergetic co-operation of scientists and scientific enthused ordinary persons. In contrast to classic super-computers, that have high acquisition-, maintenance- and operation-costs and aren't state of the art after just a few years, our Constellation computer is a worldwide distributed, continuously and dynamically evolving system with high heterogeneity in which anyone can participate who runs a computer with Windows, Linux or Mac OS X operating system. This high performance is used to solve aerospace related tasks, such as trajectory optimization (application: TrackJack). Constellation is in its late closed test-phase and will go public in the near future. Even during test-phase 550 participating machines generated approx. 120*10^9 FLoating point OPerations per Second (120 GFLOPS). When going public it can be assumed that the amount of participating machines will increase up to 5000 with about 10 TFLOPS in one Year (reference data from RNA-World, another Rechenkraft.net e.V. project). The Constellation computer represents a remarkable performance that is by far superior to high-performance clusters and it increases daily. In this way hundreds of trajectories can be simulated and optimized depending in the task's complexity per day. Participating users can follow their contribution in a clearly arranged webinterface. Finished results will be send back automatically and can be archived by the sub-projects scientists. Operation and maintenance of this system requires expenditure of time during user support, who post a variety of questions on our online-forum, so that besides the scientific aspect the project has a very interesting educational component (,,science & society").


Applications:  

Microsoft Windows (98 or later) running on an Intel x86-compatible CPU    
Microsoft Windows running on an AMD x86_64 or Intel EM64T CPU    
Linux running on an Intel x86-compatible CPU
Linux running on an AMD x86_64 or Intel EM64T CPU
Mac OS 10.4 or later running on Intel

There are also Manually Installed application that can be seen on this page:  http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/apps.html   



Web Site: http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/

Team Page   http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/team_display.php?teamid=102

BoincStats http://boincstats.com/stats/team_graph.php?pr=constellation&id=102