Cosmology@Home is a

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...

project that uses the

BOINC The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...

platform and was once run at the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

. The project has moved to the Institut Lagrange de Paris and the

Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris The Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (translated: Paris Institute of Astrophysics) is a research institute in Paris, France. The Institute is part of the Sorbonne University and is associated with the CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifiq ...

, both of which are located in the

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public university, public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussi ...

Goals

The goal of Cosmology@Home is to compare theoretical models of the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. Acc ...

to the data measured to date and search for the model that best matches it. Other goals may include: * results from Cosmology@Home can help design future cosmological observations and experiments. * results from Cosmology@Home can help prepare for the analysis of future data sets, e.g. from the

Planck spacecraft ''Planck'' was a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2009 to 2013, which mapped the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at microwave and infrared frequencies, with high sensitivity and small angu ...

Science

The goal of Cosmology@Home is to search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical and particle physics data. The models generated by Cosmology@Home can be compared to measurements of the universe's expansion speed from the

Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versa ...

as well as fluctuations in the

cosmic background radiation Cosmic background radiation is electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang. The origin of this radiation depends on the region of the spectrum that is observed. One component is the cosmic microwave background. This component is redshifted pho ...

as measured by the

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), originally known as the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP and Explorer 80), was a NASA spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences across the sky in the cosmic mic ...

Method

Cosmology@Home uses an innovative way of using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to effectively parallelize a large computational task that involves many inherently sequential calculations over a substantial number of distributed computers. For any given class of theoretically possible models of the Universe, Cosmology@Home generates tens of thousands of example Universes and packages the cosmological

parameters A parameter (), generally, is any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system (meaning an event, project, object, situation, etc.). That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when ...

describing these Universes as work units. Each work unit represents a single Universe. When the work unit is requested by a participating computer, this computer simulates this Universe from the Big Bang until today. The result of this simulation is a list of observable properties of this Universe. This result is then sent back and archived at the Cosmology@Home server. When a sufficient number of example Universes have been simulated, a machine learning algorithm called Pico, which was developed by the project scientists of Cosmology@Home for this purpose, learns from these example calculations how to do the simulation for any Universe similar to the example Universes. The difference is that Pico takes a few milliseconds per calculation rather than several hours. Training Pico on 20,000 examples takes about 30 minutes. Once Pico is trained, it can run a full comparison of the class of models (which involves hundreds of thousands of model calculations) with the observational data in a few hours on a standard CPU. The Cosmology@Home application is proprietary.

Milestones

*2007-06-30 Project launches for closed

alpha test Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , which ...

ing - invitation only. *2007-08-23 Project opens registration for public alpha testing. *2007-11-05 Project enters

beta test A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

ing stage. *2016-12-15 Project moved to the Institut Lagrange de Paris and the

Institut d'astrophysique de Paris The Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (translated: Paris Institute of Astrophysics) is a research institute in Paris, France. The Institute is part of the Sorbonne University and is associated with the CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifiq ...

, both of which are located at the

References

External links