LHC@home

Hello everyone!

My name is Frederik; you might not know me as I've almost never posted on the forum before, but chances are very high that you have been crunching some of my jobs as I have been the main LHC@Home SixTrack user in the past 6 years (mostly doing simulations that concern the magnetic inhomogeneities in the HL-LHC magnets).

First of all, let me apologise for the fact that the number of tasks has been on a record low in the previous year. This is due to a combination of two events: one is that Alessio has moved out of our team to take on a permanent position outside of CERN. As he was the main link between the Beams and IT departments for everything concerning SixTrack BOINC, managing the submission of jobs suddenly became a whole lot more complex than it used to be. The second reason is that I too changed contracts, which though still at CERN implied that the nature of my new research is less suited for a BOINC environment. I have tried as much as possible to keep submitting interesting studies to BOINC, but while results kept on returning I struggled to find the time to analyse them (and hence my speed of new submissions was limited).

Luckily there is good news as well: since the first of October a new fellow entered in our team, Thomas, which will be continuing my previous research and hence will become your main provider of interesting WUs to crunch :-D. He spent the last month familiarising himself with the research topics, and we are now setting up his environment to be able to start submitting jobs to BOINC. So expect to see the number of tasks rising exponentially the coming days/weeks. I on my side took over Alessio's responsibilities as the BOINC link with IT; I'm still learning and figuring out some of the intricacies of the system, but rest assured that things will return to normal soon.

Furthermore, I can already tell you that we have big plans for our BOINC interface in the future. The ongoing development of tracking tools in our group has opened up the advent of GPU computing for particle tracking. We are currently investigating how we can port these tools to our BOINC environment, both to allow more people in our group to be able to submit their simulations to BOINC as well as to potentially start running code on GPUs over BOINC.

Finally: thanks to you all for your continuous contribution to our research. Your help and resources really make a difference, and we cannot thank you enough for that.

Hear you soon,

Frederik

Thank you for the good news and welcome Thomas to the team!!

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Furthermore, I can already tell you that we have big plans for our BOINC interface in the future. The ongoing development of tracking tools in our group has opened up the advent of GPU computing for particle tracking. We are currently investigating how we can port these tools to our BOINC environment, both to allow more people in our group to be able to submit their simulations to BOINC as well as to potentially start running code on GPUs over BOINC.

That's great.

P.S. If you need, you can use "Compiler Explorer", that now supports also OpenCl C and C++ for OpenCl

Congratulations, looking forward