LHC@home

2021 has been another strange and challenging year, but thanks to you all the ATLAS experiment has been able to continue to produce more groundbreaking physics results. This year you simulated a total of 3 billion events! At 200 events per WU that's 15 million WU crunched. To put this into perspective, the total events simulated by all our worldwide computing resources was around 24 billion, so the contribution through LHC@Home is a really significant part of this.

Up to now all the physics analysis done using simulated data was focussed on "Run 2" of the LHC, when the experiment collected data between 2015 and 2018. Next year the LHC accelerator will restart, smashing protons together at an even higher energy than before, and an upgraded ATLAS detector will collect data for the next 3 or 4 years of "Run 3". This requires generating new simulated data with software that was radically improved for processing Run 3 data - you can read more about these improvements here.

We hope to start running this new software version here next year, and the most noticeable benefit will be the significant reduction in memory required, which we know has always caused problems for some of you. In the meantime we wish you all the best for the holiday season and for 2022!

David for the ATLAS team