LHC@home

Hi Greger & others on this thread,

I posted a message on a couple of similar threadsj ust now, but repeat it here. I agree it's frustrating and I don't actually understand what is happening with these runs. In the past, we had argued that, for some generators, we had to accept a small failure rate since we otherwise could not do comparisons to those generators at all. We had then hoped that updating them to the latest versions would gradually fix the issues we were seeing, but this has not really been the case. Having to operate with a non-negligible rate of jobs that fail is not nice, especially when this fraction does not seem to reduce with time.

I regret if we have been too slow to react, but at least now for 2022, we have come up with a plan to revitalize T4T. To start with, we are going to stop sending out jobs for the generators that are problematic, at least until we can sit down for a good proper debugging session with the authors of those codes, and fully iron their issues out so that they would be ready and steady for sending back out in T4T again.

During 2022, we plan to start by focusing our attention on getting (back) to the virtual equivalent of what the LHC machine people would call 'stable beams' for the most widely used generator, Pythia, setting a new baseline for future T4T operation. At least for that generator, our team has author-level in-house expertise, so we are confident we can do this, if we put in the hours.

At the same time, we think this can allow us to try out some new and possibly even more useful tests, which I hope we will be able to also make some announcements of down the track. So despite the issues you and others have been experiencing, I hope you will choose to stick with our project a little longer and see if things improve during 2022.

Best regards
Peter Skands