LHC@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 ...
project researching
particle physics
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...
that uses the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.
The project's computing power is utilized by physicists at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
in support of the
Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...
and other experimental particle accelerators.
The project is run with the help of over 1,260 active volunteer users contributing more than 3,000 computers processing at a combined 52
teraFLOPS .
The project is
cross-platform
Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...
, and runs on a variety of
computer hardware
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices ...
configurations.
Applications
The LHC@home project currently runs four applications—Atlas, CMS, SixTrack, and Test4Theory—which deal with different aspects of research conducted in LHC such as calculating particle beam stability and simulating proton collisions. Atlas, CMS, and Test4Theory use
VirtualBox
Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and InnoTek VirtualBox) is a hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, which was ac ...
, an
x86 virtualization software package.
Atlas
''Atlas'' uses volunteer computing power to run simulations of the
ATLAS experiment. It can be run in VirtualBox or natively on Linux.
Beauty
''Beauty'' (LHCb
) compared the decay of
bottom quark
The bottom quark, beauty quark, or b quark, is an elementary particle of the third generation. It is a heavy quark with a charge of − ''e''.
All quarks are described in a similar way by electroweak interaction and quantum chromodynamic ...
s () and bottom antiquarks (), which also known as ''beauty quarks''. The participation of volunteers in the application was suspended indefinitely on 19 November 2018.
CMS
The ''CMS'' application (formerly a standalone project called ''CMS@Home'') allows users to run simulations for the
Compact Muon Solenoid 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 application went public, with a 5000 user limit, on September 29 to commemorate CERN's 50th anniversary. Currently there is no user limit and qualification.
''SixTrack'' was developed by Frank Schmidt of the CERN Accelerators and Beams Department and produces results that are essential for verifying the long term stability of the high energy particles in the LHC. Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, stated that ''"the results from SixTrack are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform"''.
Test4Theory
The ''Test4Theory'' application allows volunteers to run simulations of high energy particle collisions on their home computers. These simulations use theoretical models based on the
Standard Model
The Standard Model of particle physics is the Scientific theory, theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetism, electromagnetic, weak interaction, weak and strong interactions – excluding gravity) in the unive ...
of particle physics, and are calculated using
Monte Carlo methods
Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on Resampling (statistics), repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve pr ...
. 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 Theory Unit at CERN runs th
MCPLotsproject, which run the database and the theoretical fitting process.
See also
*
Citizen Cyberscience Centre
*
List of volunteer computing projects
*
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
Official BOINC portalOfficial SixTrack application website*
LHC@Home– BOINC Radio - Project Brief
Applications
AtlasBeautyCMSSixTrackTest4Theory
{{DEFAULTSORT:LHC at home
E-Science
Free science software
Large Hadron Collider
Science in society
Volunteer computing projects