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MilkyWay@home Separation Is Shutting Down
Tuesday it was announced that MilkyWay@home is shutting down the Separation project. The N-Body project will continue, but that’s only available as a CPU application for 64-bit Windows and Linux, so those of us still on 32-bit will no longer be able to take part in MilkyWay@home at all, along with those on Mac and those using their GPUs for such projects. While irrelevant for me, this last part is far more important in terms of the overall number of users and the amount of work done, and some of those who were also doing some N-Body work on their CPUs while their GPUs worked on Separation may leave the project entirely, so N-Body is likely to take a hit as well.
What makes this worse is that the announcement was made on very short notice. The first message asked users how long would they like them to wait before shutting down Separation and I assumed that it’ll at least be a little while, at the very least until the end of the month, which was what I answered, if not 30 days after that announcement, as some others wrote, or even more. However, another announcement was posted a little while ago, stating that the Separation project will end on June 20, a mere week after the first announcement! That seems far too soon, either way you look at it!
As for me, as a SETI@home “orphan” who had to look for something else after 21 years there and found that MilkyWay@home was pretty much the only valid option, working on 32-bit, using very little RAM, generally offering uninterrupted work and having to do with astronomy, since no environmental projects ticking those boxes seemed to exist, needing to start looking yet again after only two years is particularly troubling. It would now seem that Asteroids@home is running again and someone said that it uses little RAM and that, while work may be intermittent, they’re only briefly out of new work to send, so keeping a buffer of a few days should be enough to always have work to do, but I’ll have to actually try it, and soon, and see whether that is actually true. Because, if that really is true, it really does seem to be the last remaining option, and it’s a good thing that it became one again, because otherwise there’d have been none left at all… Which may yet prove to be the case, if what I was told won’t actually be true, or if they’ll have problems again.