LHC@home

It seems very odd that CERN staff are heavily involved in adding VM capabilities to BOINC (see notes from the recent BOINC workshop), but LHC@home is left to rot.

My guess is that all the ruckus on the forum made the IT staff / admins / management decide we are more trouble than getting a cluster that they control and thus don\'t have to have the overhead of someone babysitting the forum.

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It looks like quite a nice cluster: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/04/lhc_xeon_endorsement/

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It looks like quite a nice cluster: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/04/lhc_xeon_endorsement/

Yeah... I guess IR = 0 is better than IR=2, IR=3, and far better than that "gosh awful" IR=5...right?

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Yeah... I guess IR = 0 is better than IR=2, IR=3, and far better than that "gosh awful" IR=5...right?

This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Bigmac clearly stated that "...someone with real authority and responsibility..." implying that he does not have the authority or responsability to go ahead with LHC@home on his own.

The exerpt from the email suggests that the Management Board is not convinced at all of the power of Boinc/LHC@home and prefers an in-house solution for the calculations. Or it might be that, with the thousands of scientists on the Collider project, it is simply a story of pet projects, power games, or complete ignorance on the topic of distributed computing.

Yeah... I guess IR = 0 is better than IR=2, IR=3, and far better than that \"gosh awful\" IR=5...right?

This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Bigmac clearly stated that \"...someone with real authority and responsibility...\" implying that he does not have the authority or responsability to go ahead with LHC@home on his own.

The exerpt from the email suggests that the Management Board is not convinced at all of the power of Boinc/LHC@home and prefers an in-house solution for the calculations. Or it might be that, with the thousands of scientists on the Collider project, it is simply a story of pet projects, power games, or complete ignorance on the topic of distributed computing.

Due to the unrelenting antics of a particular individual, the admins of this server, and the only moderators of the forum that I am aware of, had to endure a constant disruptive behavior and daily babysitting of this forum just to attempt to keep a single individual from intentionally smearing the project, and thus CERN and Queen Mary by proxy.

I would think that such antics played at least some kind of part in the decision-making process on the need of utilizing the BOINC platform...

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If LHC@home could have provided 100,000 cpu equivalents despite the antics of a certain individual and the reply ramblings of others instead of the less than 100 cpu equivalents, then the antics and ramblings are a side effect of what can be a huge cost saver.

Easy to ignore.

Anyway, it\'s up to the higher LHC realms to decide what to do next. Obviously LHC@home still gets support from the user base otherwise these boards would be dead for a longtime already. If the people with the power decide to continue with LHC@home, then they obviously will get more than their current less-than-100 internal volunteers.

It looks like quite a nice cluster: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/04/lhc_xeon_endorsement/

Might this have anything to do with it?
\\\\\\\"Intel is keen to persuade CIOs to refresh their server architecture at the moment, claiming it can deliver 92 per cent power savings in an upgrade focused on energy efficiency (as opposed to one also aiming for more performance).\\\\\\\"

Obviously LHC@home still gets support from the user base otherwise these boards would be dead for a longtime already.

What was said:

CPSS is down to less than 100 active volunteers and LHC@home support
has been dead for a year and it appears unlikely that IT will support it.

That means that the server is on, but nobody is taking care of things, as evidenced by the lack of fixing the silly reply window here and not fixing where single/double-quotes cause an escape sequence, among other trivial things. It doesn\'t sound like there is an interest, and likely the server here is just being kept running until an official \"sunset\" annoucement is made...or a server failure happens, whichever comes first...

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Sadly to say, you do have a point. I CERNtainly hope that the need will bring us back. But you are correct about the ' and the ". And what about my picture. Just because I look like OZZY OSBOURNE dosn't mean you can't show it!
NAGILUM

Okay the / just disappeared. what happened?

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LHC@home isn\'t broke it\'s just out of juice.
It\'s still up and running even an update now and then.

When the LHC is running again i believe the orange will come again :).

I have 1/2 clients looking in to it next to other projects.

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Thanks for the update bigmac.

I\'m sure CERN/IT have their reasons for not supporting BOINC. Not invented in their backyard perhaps?

Just think if they had\'ve utilised us during the outrage then maybe the beam would have gone around 10 times instead of just 2! And to think, finding the beam stability areas is what we do....what a crying waste of resources.

Live long and BOINC.

Didn\'t it circulate for several minutes? That\'s a lot more than 2 times o-o Beam 2 did the same, too.
I do agree with The Gas Giant though - seems like a damn waste.
Either way, good luck to everyone at CERN; I hope things continue to go as well.

Didn't it circulate for several minutes? That's a lot more than 2 times o-o Beam 2 did the same, too.
I do agree with The Gas Giant though - seems like a damn waste.
Either way, good luck to everyone at CERN; I hope things continue to go as well.

According to CERN the beam testing referred to here lasted 1/40,000,000 of a sec. As best I can tell with my math that's about 2 (27 Km) turns at near 97% the speed of light. Some people might call that a waste of energy and time but I believe it's better to be safe. We don't want to spend another year waiting for repairs to finish. Even though we haven't received work through LHC@home the news on this blog is very exciting to monitor, and this seems to be the best place to hear the newest developments.
Thanks to bigmac!

Dear All; I havent seen it in
writing but it looks like CERN/IT will NOT support the BOINC servers....

It is interesting to note that CERN/IT doesn\'t have the resources to support BOINC but there are resources to support people tweeting what is going on.

dear lhc@homers,

yes it was a nice project. (a beautiful project)
and yes lhc did have it\'s publicity stunt.

now it seems to be over.

we are not a herd with cpu\'s. we have a choice.
just find other projects for your very hungry cpu\'s

and yes, follow the news about lhc. it must be interesting to all of us.

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If we just all let LHC@home stand as a backupproject.

The LHC@home can say: \\\"look at the support of people that is waiting to help us\\\"

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I don\'t think that the reason for which CERN does not support LHC@home is financial. CERN employs more than 2000 people on its budget. Two or three persons, even working part time, could manage LHC@home. The same number supports SETI, which has about one million users, with some donations from industry and also from the same users.The main reason is covered by the Greek term \"hubris\". The scientists do not want their precious data given to a bunch of amateurs. The same thing is happening at Einstein@home, where data from the Virgo Italian/French interferometer at Cascina, Pisa, are not provided to Einstein@home, which crunches data coming from the American Interferometers of the LIGO cooperation and also from the Arecibo radiotelescope. The people staffing Virgo are mostly physicists from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, which follows on the line given by Enrico Fermi and his Rome group known as \"I ragazzi di Via Panisperna\". The American scientists are more openminded.
Tullio

I don\'t think that the reason for which CERN does not support LHC@home is financial. CERN employs more than 2000 people on its budget. Two or three persons, even working part time, could manage LHC@home. The same number supports SETI, which has about one million users, with some donations from industry and also from the same users.The main reason is covered by the Greek term \"hubris\".

I wonder how far hubris funds a project in the economic world of today where countries are trying to limit spending that appears unnecessary to digging their way out of a major recession?

"Hubris" A facinating choice of words here. Hubris (/hjuːbrɪs/) (ancient Greek ὕβρις) is a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, haughtiness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or Nemesis. It's quite possible that this is a correct discription, what with all of the display of ignorant protest by the unintelligent people led astray by sci-fi dreamers like "Walter Wagner" , while we the people with true intent on helping this project are disallowed participation due to fears of disambiguation and explotation of classified information. However I still believe in people like "bigmac" who I think believes in us too. After all we are just voluntering our energy, time, and CPU power, to help science progress.

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