LHC@home

LHC@home is a distributed computing project for particle physics based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.[3] The project's computing power is utilized by physicists at CERN in support of the Large Hadron Collider and other experimental particle accelerators.[4]

LHC@home
Initial releaseSixTrack: 1 September 2004
Test4Theory: 1 August 2011
Development statusActive
Operating systemCross-platform
PlatformBOINC
Average performanceATLAS: 34.2 TFLOPS[1]
SixTrack: 7.7 TFLOPS[1]
Test4Theory: 4.2 TFLOPS[1]
CSM: 16 GFLOPS[1]
Active users11,382[2]
Total users168,970[2]
Websitelhcathome.web.cern.ch

The project is run with the help of about twenty thousand active volunteered computers processing at a combined more than 45.5 teraFLOPS on average as of April 2020.[1][2] The project is cross-platform, and runs on a variety of computer hardware configurations.

Applications

LHC@home consists of four applications: Atlas, SixTrack, Test4Theory and CMS which deal with different aspects of research conducted in LHC like calculating particle beam stability and simulating proton collisions. Atlas, Test4Theory, and CMS use VirtualBox, an x86 virtualization software package.[1][4]

Atlas

Atlas@home uses volunteer computing power to run simulations of the ATLAS experiment experiment. It can be run in VirtualBox or natively on Linux.

Beauty

Beauty (LHCb[5]) compared the decay of bottom quarks (
b
) and bottom antiquarks (
b
), which also known as beauty quarks. The participation of volunteers in the application was suspended indefinitely on 19 November 2018.[5]

CMS

CMS@Home allows users to run simulations for the CMS experiment on their computers.

SixTrack

SixTrack was first introduced as a beta on 1 September 2004 and a record 1000 users signed up within 24 hours. The project went public, with a 5000 user limit, on September 29 to commemorate CERN's 50th anniversary. Currently there is no user limit and qualification. Data from the project is utilized by engineers to improve the operation and efficiency of the accelerator, and to predict possible problems that could arise from adjustment or modification of the LHC's equipment.

SixTrack simulates particles accelerating through the 27 km (17 mi)-long LHC to find their orbit stability. In one workunit, 60 particles are simulated travelling 100,000 or 1,000,000 loops, which would take about 10 seconds in an actual run. The orbit stability data is used to detect if a particle in orbit goes off-course and runs into the tube wall—if this happened too often in actual running, this would cause damage to the accelerator which would need repairs.

Test4Theory

Also known as "Virtual LHC@home" or "LHC@home 2.0" according to the evolutions of technology. The Test4Theory project allows volunteers to run simulations of high energy particle collisions on their home computers. These simulations use theoretical models based on the Standard Model of particle physics, and are calculated using Monte Carlo methods. The theoretical models have adjustable parameters and the aim is that a given set of parameters (called a "tune") will fit the widest possible range of experimental results.

The Test4Theory results are therefore submitted to a database which contains a very wide set of experimental data from many accelerator experiments worldwide, including of course experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The database and the theoretical fitting process is part of the project MCPLots, based in the Theory Unit at CERN. In 2017, all of the Virtualbox Projects were moved over to LHC@home to join SixTrack.

See also

References
  1. "BOINC LHC@home applications". LHCAtHome.Cern.ch. Retrieved 29 April 2020.
  2. "BOINC server_status". LHCAtHome.Cern.ch. Retrieved 29 April 2020.
  3. "BOINC projects list". Retrieved 30 April 2020.
  4. "LHC@home". LHCAtHome.CERN.ch. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
  5. Roiser, Stefan (19 November 2018). "Pausing Submission of LHCb Applications". LHCAtHome.Cern.ch. Retrieved 22 December 2020.

LHC@home projects
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