LHC@home

Dear volunteers,

following Nils's post on the MBs:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5129&postid=39763#39763
the SixTrack team is looking into welcoming you at CERN and greet you for the CPU time you make available to us. To do so in the best way, we would like to know when you will be most likely passing by the IT stand, such that we concentrate our efforts on the time when most of you can be there. Hence, please find below a doodle that we will use to target the optimal time window:
https://doodle.com/poll/qpw36awgspufawi7

Thanks a lot in advance, and happy crunching!
Alessio and Massimo, for the SixTrack team

I would make the 5,200 mile drive if my car could cross the Atlantic and North America or just fly and get a Hilton room for a month if I got 25 cents per credit here and that might even get the wife to go

Hi there !

I'll be joining saturday to meet you and understand a bit more why my cpu is burning :-) Could you tell us where is located the meeting point ? I read that it's the building 504… but on which site is that ? 
https://opendays.cern/fr/map

Thanks for your answer :)
Best regards

I would make the 5,200 mile drive if my car could cross the Atlantic and North America or just fly and get a Hilton room for a month if I got 25 cents per credit here and that might even get the wife to go

Many many thanks!

I'll be joining saturday to meet you and understand a bit more why my cpu is burning :-) Could you tell us where is located the meeting point ? I read that it's the building 504… but on which site is that ? 

The meeting point is restaurant number 2 on the main CERN site (i.e. Meyrin). I think that the LHC@Home stand should be located at ground floor, in the hall.
See you tomorrow!
A.

With the Open Days markings please follow: "ME66" and the Data Centre. LHC@home and restaurant 2 in building 504 is nearby.

I will continue to give all I've got over here in Austin, Texas. I have two questions:
1. Can you post a presentation on what this distributed computing project is helping your team accomplish?
2. Is there a way your project can leverage GPUs for computation as well?

Cheers :)

-Eddie

I would make the 5,200 mile drive if my car could cross the Atlantic and North America or just fly and get a Hilton room for a month if I got 25 cents per credit here and that might even get the wife to go

Many many thanks!

I couldn't sleep so I am up early PDT watching the webcast

https://webcast.web.cern.ch/event/691/camera
(they just lost the audio)

This is very nice that the six track team invite us to visit the team but it is imposible to have acces at the collider : there came so many visitors that the entrance was quickly closed the first day.
It was aqble to visit the other part of the complex and discover the precisión of the assembly of the component of the detector.
When you discover the hand there are needed it is similar to créate in a life one ton of artificial flies for fishing with high precisión
this was completely outside of usual norm for worker

Some considerations after OpenCern
- first all, THANKS to all volunteers for their kindness and competence. They help me, my wife and my two sons to better understand LHC, physics and science. Thank you
- second, too much people to underground experiment. May be, the next time, use a prenotation service
- third, cause of some problems, i coult not partecipate to meeting with LHC@Home guys. But, at the end of the day, waiting bus 18 with a LOT of people, i saw a known face...with a t-shirt of lhc@home (i have a t-shirt of Boinc Italy)...and a badge "Eric McIntosh"!!! 10 minutes of very interesting talk about project. What a person, what a energy (despite his condition)!!

P.S.
Please, change all external venetian blinds. Are horrible.

I finally reached lhc@home saturday… at 5.15 pm. I have never seen such a mess to get somewhere, and that much of people trying to do the same, but maybe in tokyo at the rush hour… I was a bit horrified, but also very happy to see so much people interested in science and to what's happening at Cern. I even had a talk with a Slovenian girl, working in an airport, that came alone by car from her country just for love of physics…
But for sure, next time i'll plan early enough to be on time…
By the way, that was very nice to have proposed such a meeting and i hope this will be renewed.

See you and thanks for the awesome gift you gave to people coming at the stand !

Don't forget that CERN is open for visits throughout the year!

Hi Nicholas, I'm a bit late too tell you where.
Many many people had difficulty finding us, and not just us.
There was a crazy system of naming ME23, ME15, etc etc.
You needed a smart phone to have any chance. I am
complaining to organisers, why was there NO MAP!
We had only half the volunteers expected on Saturday,
around 10, and 3 on Sunday. Never mind we shall shortly
post our presentations on the WWW with links from here, the MBs.

Yes, your CPU will get hot. SixTrack is CPU intensive. Many systems
throttle back the CPU(s) when the temperature rises.

Thanks for your support. Eric

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Hi Eddie, our presentations are coming. I am making a big
effort on our WWW pages.
GPUs.....we can run, but I'll expand on this later.
Old GPU's are not IEEE 754. The memory requirement becomes
large, as do the sizes of the result files.

Thanks for your support.. Eric

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You needed a smart phone to have any chance. I am complaining to organisers, why was there NO MAP!

And no open wifi for guests.
Switzerland are out of phone roaming from other EU countries, so a wifi are welcome!!

P.S.
It was a pleasure to meet you

It was nice meeting everyone! Sorry that I showed up so late though.

I would make the 5,200 mile drive if my car could cross the Atlantic and North America or just fly and get a Hilton room for a month if I got 25 cents per credit here and that might even get the wife to go

Indeed. I would also make my 6,000 miles from São Paulo...and if everything was not charged in dollars here...

First of all the German Rechenkraft.net team would like to thank Ben Segal, Ian McIntosh, David Cameron and all the others involved for organizing both the ATLAS@home and the LHC@home booths which our team visited with 13 people on Saturday, 14th.
Also, thanks a lot for the nice two special talks on Sixtrack and the 1 TB magnetic cartridges we all got as a gift.
Maybe it would be nice to post the PDF of the information leaflet we got at the talk somewhere here in the forum for download.

We had an amazing (!) weekend and many of us managed to visit all four underground detector sites. Several GB of photos and videos were recorded and of course we posted a first extract of all these marvellous impressions on our Twitter account - if you like, just take a look:

ATLAS detector
LHCb detector
LHCb high performance cluster & LHC liquid helium cooling tanks
CAST telescope to answer dark matter-related questions (search for axions from the sun)
ALICE detector (big bang-like event generator)
LHC accelerator tunnel (near the ALICE detector)
CMS detector

I was actually surprised how many people brought their entire families along including kids for which a lot of nice activities were provided, too. Excellent!
Of course, due to so many people, waiting times to enter the underground sites were ridiculously long: If I remember correctly, on the first day we waited almost 4 hours after entry at 9 am to only see the ATLAS detector for around 20 minutes. And this was located nearby, directly at the main entrance (resulting in people rushing there first, of course).

Although there was a nice app provided for the visitors, no free WiFi was available but internet access was essential to be able to see the waiting times for the detector sites. Many German providers appear to simply not broadcast around the CERN sites and the Eduroam cross-country university network could only be accessed after a device was identified over the CERN WiFi. For accessing the CERN network, however, one had to register and I was lucky that Ben approved my effort to do so rather quickly - thanks a lot for that, because only based on this we finally made it to all the remaining sites of interest on Sunday after more sophisticated app planning. ;-)
The app also appeared to consume quite some electricity, so people tended to use it savingly to be able to continue to use their smartphones for photography purposes.

I think, in order to easily recruit more distributed computing volunteers it would have been very helpful to setup the ATLAS@home booth directly next to the ATLAS waiting queue and have some people deliver LHC@home & subproject flyers. Just an idea... ;-)

Since CERN wanted to collect some statistical data of the individual site occupation by manual wristband scanning, people were unfortunately not only queueing up heavily at the site entrances but also at the exit areas - which really was quite annoying due to the caused delays. Maybe an RFID solution could help solve that problem next time?

All in all it was more than worth to travel the long distance from Germany to visit the CERN OpenDays.
A nice thing for the future would be a yellow VIP wristband for volunteer computing participants which should allow us to directly proceed to the underground sites - omitting the waiting queues of course... ;-)

Best regards,
Michael.

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Yes, your CPU will get hot. SixTrack is CPU intensive. Many systems
throttle back the CPU(s) when the temperature rises.

Thanks for your support. Eric

My Ryzen 5 1400 runs 8 SixTrack tasks at a time without any problem. But many VirtualBox Atlas tasks are classified as invalid.
Tullio

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First of all the German Rechenkraft.net team would like to thank Ben Segal, Ian McIntosh, David Cameron and all the others involved for organizing both the ATLAS@home and the LHC@home booths which our team visited with 13 people on Saturday, 14th.

This time i'm the only one from Boinc Italy team. Maybe next time our teams could organize a joint venture :-)

Of course, due to so many people, waiting times to enter the underground sites were ridiculously long: If I remember correctly, on the first day we waited almost 4 hours after entry at 9 am to only see the ATLAS detector for around 20 minutes. And this was located nearby, directly at the main entrance (resulting in people rushing there first, of course).

With my sons i decided to go on "baby parts" of Meyrin site (and they had a great time). After this, Atlas was closed for 2hours for "security problems" (too much people).
At the end, i cannot go on underground.

A nice thing for the future would be a yellow VIP wristband for volunteer computing participants which should allow us to directly proceed to the underground sites - omitting the waiting queues of course... ;-)

+1
:-)