Re: SETI like tass project

["Dirk Terrell" <terrell@boulder.swri.edu>]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 16:02:52 -0600, Tom Droege wrote:

>Let's discuss how we might do this.

I have a bit of experience in this area. I do the OS/2 port of the S@H
client and I have written a distributed computing client/server project
called SwiftPC that does solar system dynamics calculations.

The TASS data situation is probably quite a bit different from S@H or
SwiftPC in that the CPU need per megabyte of data is much lower. That
is, we are probably bandwidth limited rather than CPU limited with this
problem. The time required to download data will be larger than the
processing time. That's not the kind of problem that lends itself to
distributed computing. The way to tackle this problem is, as you
suggest, to have a few machines chew through it. In the long run, I
think you want to process the data as they are taken, eliminating the
need to do a huge amount all at once. Now, where it might get
interesting is if you have a bunch of (date,magnitude) pairs for huge
numbers of objects and you want to do a variability analysis. That
might be more appropriate for a distributed computing project.

Dirk