The project “Orbits@Home” is a distributed project that will compute if near-earth objects will collide with the earth. The project was first published in November of 2004. The project recently finished installation of a server on BOINC, or Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, on March 4th, 2008 (this past Tuesday).

The reason for using a system like BOINC to perform these computations is that the require more storage space, computational power, and time that the researcher than have on a cluster of computers (or supercomputer, if they have access). If the project can also be broken down into thousands or millions of individual tasks, researchers can utilize distrubuted computations to speed up results. Results which show promise of being important are flagged, and then the researchers will re-run the data sets again to verify results.

As discussed at the begining of the semester, as well as outlined in our first programming assignment, root finding is not a simple task. Finding the roots of these near-earth objects requires a significant amount of computational power. Thus, users will download a single object to track and calculate the proximity at which it will come to earth. If the object’s path is calculated to come within a pre-determined distance of earth, the result is flagged as important and will be re-tested serveral times by the project leaders to verify it’s importance. Overall, the project is designed to monitor the impact hazard of near-earth objects in space.

Relavent links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit%40home
http://orsa.sourceforge.net/
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/