LHC@home

Does anyone know, for how long, we (the BOINC users) will be able to participate in the LHC project? Will it only be while they need to calculate at which condition, they will get the most stabel run or will we also be able to help with analysing the work there has been done, when the particle accelerator at CERN is opening up and starts to work? In other words will LHC closedown for BOINC use, somewhere in the future?

> Does anyone know, for how long, we (the BOINC users) will be able to
> participate in the LHC project? Will it only be while they need to calculate
> at which condition, they will get the most stabel run or will we also be able
> to help with analysing the work there has been done, when the particle
> accelerator at CERN is opening up and starts to work? In other words will LHC
> closedown for BOINC use, somewhere in the future?
>
>

I'm going to guess that it'll be up as long as distributed computing saves them time in construction of the project.

Maybe when the collider is running they'll shop out sensor workunits that listen to the data and perform calculations on sensor data for the zillion odd sensors.


______________________________________________________________
Member of the Carl Sagan team.

Ur Q.:How long will we be able to participate in LHC?

A.: The hole future life.


Happy chrunching time...

They are supposed to have a grid type of computer up which is similar to distributed computing, but much more powerful, when LHC opens in 2007. It is so ambitious, I am skeptical it can come about in two years. I believe BOINC is theoritically capable of storing information. I cannot predict the future, but I believe it is possible that as we get closer to 2007 when LHC will open, they may look to BOINC as a plan B back up if the grid system does not come off as rapidly as expected.

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> They are supposed to have a grid type of computer up which is similar to
> distributed computing, but much more powerful, when LHC opens in 2007. It is
> so ambitious, I am skeptical it can come about in two years. I believe BOINC
> is theoritically capable of storing information. I cannot predict the future,
> but I believe it is possible that as we get closer to 2007 when LHC will open,
> they may look to BOINC as a plan B back up if the grid system does not come
> off as rapidly as expected.
>

There are already some working grids that can be used to analyse data coming from LHC. The current grids are not the final answer for LHC computing and many people are still working to improve these grids. Especially handling large
amounts of data needs more work. More information:
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/
http://www.nordugrid.org/
(state of this grid: http://www.nordugrid.org/monitor/loadmon.php)
http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/
http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egee-intranet/gateway.html

BOINC is now very useful in building the LHC. After LHC has started, there will be more work for BOINC to optimize how the accelerator works. We can also use BOINC to answer new questions (like beam-beam interaction) during LHC operation.

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