LHC@home

The work we do here is valuable to the LHC

I agree. I say crunch for the LCH while you can at time of this post there are 27,093 Workunit's to be crunched. all the workunit's I have crunched haven't got stuck but they have been up around the 8 hour mark.
Cheers
Speedy

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Have A Crunching Good day

From reading this thread, I have a scientific background and I find it strange the arrangement this project has with CERN. I also believe some people who contribute their machines to these projects fail to realise just how few people acturally develop these distributed projects. Further to that funding is always an issue for most projects and only a few get proper consist backing, examples are folding@home, Einstein@home, (even seti@home has trouble with funding.)

The good will of people to donate their machines and the electricity that goes with it, which at the end of the day costs money, is one that is also overlooked.

Either way, reading on this thread calls for porting the grid/software over to boinc is sadly un-realistic. Reading up on the LHC experiment reveals that most of the data they capture from the live runs will be thrown away due to there simply being to much data with which to process. Petabytes of information will be produced each year and that captured data will be used by scientists all over the world for a long time to come. Who knows maybe some scientists will find creating their own @home projects from the resulting data that is produced by the LHC experiments.

The only way I can see LHC@home moving forward is either:-

1. Money appearing
2. CERN deciding to take a more central control
3. Making the project open source and letting the open source community build software for the purpose put forward by the scientists at CERN.

The dream of LHC@home processing live data when the experiment begins is just a dream, but the work the two people do in their spare time to develop LHC@home should be recognised and respected as Im sure they see the potential of LHC@home greater than any of the crunchers who participate.

I agree with you. But LHC has not produced any data so far and it might be some times before this huge machine performs its experiments. Meanwhile the US Department of Energy (www.doe.gov) is offering time on its supercomputers centers to scientific institutions and universities the world over via the INCITE program. Maybe they have spare cycles too which can be used.
Tullio