Akarsh Simha is pursuing a very ambitious project for Google Summer of Code 2008: He's increasing the number of stars displayed by KStars by a factor of 10 (from 130,000 to over 1 million), without having a negative impact on the performance of the program. James Bowlin and I are his co-mentors in this project. James and Akarsh spent the pre-coding SoC period hashing out the code architecture required for this effort, which allowed Akarsh to hit the ground running when he started to code. His progress has been amazing: in the kstars/summer branch, we are already displaying over 2 million stars, and it feels just as responsive as trunk, because the new architecture is extremely efficient in memory usage.
Sound too good to be true? Check out this side-by-side comparison of 3.5 branch and trunk, where I zoom in on the Carina nebula region with both versions of the program.
We already have plans to increase the number of stars to 10 million, 100 million...maybe even 1 billion stars. However, the data for 1 billion stars is around 60 GB, so distribution is problematic.
Syndicate Blogs
Documentation about the architecture
Yes, I do plan to document it some time. But I can't promise when. There are already some minor details in READMEs in appropriate directories like README.fileformat in the kstars/data/ directory and James' HTM README that Jason pointed out.
Awesome
Great work! Is Akarsh going to write something about the new architecture? I'm kind of curious
There's some stuff at his
There's some stuff at his blog, but so far the best description of the new architecture that enabled 1e6 stars is in a README file written by James:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/kstars/skycomponents/README.indexing?revision=813015&view=markup
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KStars: A desktop planetarium for KDE
This is really impressive
This is really impressive work. Well done.
Matt Williams