LHC@home

Dear Volunteers of the SixTRack project of LHC@home,

I would like to give you some information about our plans for the studies.

As you know already, the LHC@home servers have been migrated back to CERN last summer and after a period of tests we are back in production.

The aim is to use this additional CPU-power to continue studying the behaviours of the protons in the current LHC and, what is even more important, to benchmark our simulations with beam measurements! Even if the machine is running with an exceptional performance, there are still a lot of things to understand.

But this is not all...as some of you have noticed, the future of the LHC is already under study.

Last week there was a kick-off meeting at CERN to launch the international collaboration that will study paths to increase even further the LHC performance (by about a factor of ten). The horizon is far in the future (not earlier than 2020), but there are several hot fronts.

Furthermore, this upgrade will require not only studies, but also the construction of new and more powerful magnets (to provide more focused beams at the collision points): the delay between the beginning of the studies and the final construction of the hardware is several years.

By now, not only CERN, but also other labs will contribute to the studies for the LHC upgrade (the international part of this project is called HiLUmi, while the CERN part is HL-LHC, just to introduce you to the various acronyms).

However, the start-up of the massive numerical simulations will be gradual and you should not expect a steep increase in the work load immediately after the official kick-off meeting.

In these complex collaborations we have to export our (i.e., CERN) tools to all collaborations and this is always a delicate process. Still it is crucial to ensure certified results.

At the moment, several studies to improve our understanding of the nominal LHC machine are under way (I have submitted some papers at the forthcoming IPAC12 conference) and the first studies for the upgrade should be launched in December or in January at the latest.

Another important point...this type of studies requires intensive numerical simulations and then data analysis and...reflection! This means that the workload will not be uniform (some of you are well aware of this), but some quite moments are to be expected. However, this does not mean that the studies are over! I will do my best to keep a communication channel always opened.

Last point...in the coming weeks we will devote some efforts also to upgrade our server software to the latest version and the web site will undergo some restyling, not to mention that we would like to launch some collaboration to provide simple, robust, and scientifically sound graphics for the SixTrack project.

I think it is all for the moment. Once more I would like to thank you for your help and support!

Massimo Giovannozzi

PS: you will find some news about me in my CERN home page...

Thanks for the update and the hard work CERN is doing! Glad to be able to help and willing to be here for years to come!

Thanks for the news Massimo Giovannozzi, and the project information.

Grazie, Signore.

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Thanks for the news!

Regards

Thanks for the info Massimo,

Ok send me some tasks!

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Volunteer Mad Scientist For Life

Dear Volunteers of the SixTrack project of LHC@home,

In spite of the silence simulations continued in the past months!
Eric McIntosh continued working on his project to obtain bit-by-bit identical results on different architectures and he seems to be at the end of his enterprise.

We have still plans to upgrade the software and this will come together with a long awaited MAC version of the SixTrack executable. You will hear more in the coming weeks.

On the front of the simulations I have done some studies for the nominal LHC machine that is being restarted in these days at an even higher energy (of 4 TeV).

The fruits of former massive simulations campaigns have been collected in a paper that was published earlier this year. For all those interested, they can find the paper at the following address

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900211022613

It goes without saying that this paper would not have been possible without your help! And your very valuable contribution is warmly acknowledged in the paper.

Ahead of us there is the International Particle Accelerator Conference in May this year and there will be a number of papers based on tracking studies which were made possible thanks to LHC@home.
I will keep you informed on the paper produced to keep you posted on the results that you contributed to.

On the down side, we did not manage to finalise the collaboration to add valuable graphics to the SixTrack application. This will need to be reviewed in the future. In case some of you would have ideas we might consider your contribution.

This is all by now...Please stay tuned and contribute to our project!

Massimo

Thanks for the update. It's nice to see a little bit of work come trickling out and I just keep on crunching. Got some over the past two days.

I'm looking forward to the flood gates opening someday. :)

Cheers

Massimo,

Thanks for the update, great to hear we are making a valuable contribution to the project.

In regard to graphics, I personally don't ever use the screen saver or graphics so it would be a waste of resource in my opinion. Given that this project doesn't have much resource I feel it would be better used elswhere. e.g. improving your science.

Hi Massimo,

thanks for the news. Looking forward to new workunits.

Unfortunately the download of the paper is not free of charge :(
Maybe you can link it here?


Michael

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Team Linux Users Everywhere

Preprint of the article is available at
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1414744

Massimo,

Thanks for the update. I don't expect many people here will be too worried about graphics. Put the effort into the science... and updates here, of course! Thanks again.

John.

Massimo,

Thanks for the update. I don't expect many people here will be too worried about graphics. Put the effort into the science... and updates here, of course! Thanks again.

John.

I second that.

I've read the article (at least partially) and I am glad we have been thanked. But are we not getting very few credits? I get in SETI@home about the double amount of credit for the same CPU time. Of course I am running also LHC@home 2.
Tullio