
GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets for Golden Insight Nuggets - rbanffy
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/04/16/gpus-mine-astronomical-datasets-for-golden-insight-nuggets/
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tehsauce
At my university's astronomy dept we've developed gpu software and used it to
discover many new objects in the kuiper belt. It's robust enough that it can
also be used to detect airplanes.

[https://github.com/DiracInstitute/kbmod](https://github.com/DiracInstitute/kbmod)

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calebh
That's really neat! What do you use for training data?

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twtw
GPUs can do things besides machine learning. It uses a maximum likelihood
estimator, so no training data.

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atonse
This makes me curious – remember back in the oughts where SETI@Home and
Folding@Home were popular? Were those adapted for GPUs and saw a huge
acceleration in calculations?

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kawfey
If distributed computing had a fraction of time on the millions of GPUs mining
cryptocurrencies, I can't imagine how close we'd be to curing disease and
finding ET.

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nicwilson
Time for a cryptocurrency for F@H?

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simias
The problem of replacing the general purpose proof of work in cryptocurrencies
(finding partial SHA256 collisions in the case of Bitcoin) with something more
useful is that the attributes for a good PoW computation are hard to find in
real world distributed problems.

In particular you want something a problem with the following attributes:

\- must derive somehow from the block data you're trying to mine, otherwise
you could reuse your work for an different block and make double-spend attacks
trivial. It's very important that once a new block is mined everybody else
must start from scratch for the next one, otherwise you could "premine" an
arbitrary number of blocks and later append them at an arbitrary position in
the block "tree", potentially rewriting history.

\- difficulty should easily be modifiable to account for the current
"hashrate" otherwise your blockrate will go whack as the amount of computing
power available changes. It also means that you should be able ahead of time
to guess the difficulty of a problem and the average amount of processing
power required to solve it.

\- easy to validate: the nodes of the network should be able to check that the
proof of work is valid using a tiny fraction of the computing power necessary
to actually produce the proof (finding hash collisions is hard, verifying them
is comparatively trivial).

\- doesn't require access to a centralized resource. If you need to connect to
some central repository to fetch the work set then not everybody is on equal
footing. You have a single point of failure and some miners could have
privileged access to the work data.

It's very difficult to find real world problems that have all these
attributes.

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nicwilson
It wansn't a particularly serious suggestion, but thanks for the explanation.

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simias
Oh I took it very seriously because it's something I've given quite a lot of
thought. I'm not a huge believer in cryptocurrencies but I would be a lot more
optimistic about them if they weren't wasting so much energy. Harnessing all
that processing power to do something useful would be amazing. Unfortunately
so far the most useful PoW people have manage to implement are things like
"compute very large prime numbers" which I suppose is mildly more useful than
finding SHA256 collisions but not by a very large margin.

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nylonstrung
Can we please never use the phrase "data nuggets" again

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arnon
I second that.

Also, leverage.

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panzagl
Why do I have a data lake if I can't leverage that for insight nuggets?

