LHC@home

Hi everyone,

Good news!
Finally, after many years of development / halted development / shifting developer resources etc, we have a working executable for Xtrack jobs.

Xtrack is a particle tracking code (in Python compiled to C) as a successor to SixTrack (which was in FORTRAN). Many new functionalities have been added with respect to the original, and to make our lives easier, they are assembled as a collection of Python packages in the so-called Xsuite project (github.com/xsuite). One such package is Xboinc, which provides all functionality for our scientific users to be able to submit jobs to BOINC.

We have continued in the spirit of SixTrack by providing a light-weight executable that can run without the need for a virtual environment. This implies that not all functionality of Xtrack can be used on BOINC (essentially, everything that is purely tracked in C works; advanced multi-particle techniques, which need Python in between, won't). A large fraction of our simulations can hence run on BOINC from now on.

On the dev server, we have deployed version 0.4 (for Linux and Windows, both for 32-bit and 64-bit) and tested it during the previous weeks. We feel confident about moving it to the production server soon. However, please give us a bit of time to start generating jobs - our users are no longer used to BOINC, so we are generating a bit of momentum on our side to get people to submit their simulations to BOINC.

Eager to get some large simulations done, and as always, very grateful for you to crunch our jobs,

Frederik

+1

@Frederik
Could you please add some more information, like:
- is it singlecore/multicore
- is it CPU/GPU
- how much RAM is required
- how big are uploads/downloads
- does it require permanent network connections to the project servers
- what are the expected runtimes on an average computer

- is it singlecore/multicore
- is it CPU/GPU

For now, it is single-core CPU. Xtrack supports CPU multicore and GPU (CUDA and OpenCL), but these are done dynamically from Python. To get it on BOINC we'll need to precompile all these architectures. Not too difficult, but we'll need a bit of time to figure out how to do it robustly. We decided to focus first on getting some of our users on board to start generating jobs, but it is certainly in the pipeline.

- how much RAM is required
- how big are uploads/downloads

Tbh I am not able to give you an exact number as I did not benchmark it. But typically our (compilable) jobs don't use a lot of memory (10-100MB). The way it works is that our input file (the job file sent to you) has a description of the accelerator lattice (typically 5-20MB), and memory buffers for the particles that will be tracked (typically 5-50MB). Optionally, there are also memory buffers for logging information. The RAM usage should be approximately the same. The output file consists of the same memory buffers (hopefully now filled with sensible information) but without the accelerator lattice, so it is a bit smaller.

- does it require permanent network connections to the project servers

Except for the initial download of the job and final upload of its results, no network connection is used.

- what are the expected runtimes on an average computer

This, we are still tweaking. We have ensured that the very short jobs (as were unfortunately common with SixTrack) should be very rare to non-existent. We are aiming for jobs in the order of 8h-24h, but we will have to benchmark how it goes.

This sounds great!
When you setup the task supply system, please check and fix the sixtrack job graphs here on the server. They stopped working at start of 2022, long before the jobs dried out.

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Congrats, looking forward

Can you make it output something in stderr.txt instead of nothing?

Hi

Can you clarify if there is a link with the LHC dev "xtrack beam" application currently being tested ?

On your application page it says windows and linux only, there is no macOS app planned ?

Thanks

Will it support AMD RX 7000/9000 GPUs?
Does it require special drivers for AMD Radeon Adrenaline/AMD PRO GPUs?
Support windows 10/11?

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Great news, can't wait to put my 50 threads spread across 5 devices to work.
Many many years (and BOINC accounts) ago I still remember those crazy short sixtrack jobs...

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Many many years (and BOINC accounts) ago I still remember those crazy short sixtrack jobs...

In the dev-site, the wus are NOT short..
https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/forum_thread.php?id=723

Will it support AMD RX 7000/9000 GPUs?
Does it require special drivers for AMD Radeon Adrenaline/AMD PRO GPUs?

This is the first version for CPUs. I think it's too early to think about GPUs.

In the dev-site, the wus are NOT short..
https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/forum_thread.php?id=723

Yes, I understand that the issue isn't expected to reappear. By the way, is it possible to get an invitation code for the dev-site?

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Oh this is great news!
I miss Sixtrack as I'm a Windows user. Hopefully it is 1 wu/thread kinda stuff.

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Yes, I understand that the issue isn't expected to reappear.

- i don't know if it is an issue or a feature
- the app version seems the same between lhc-dev and lhc projects

Maybe this app needs a lot of computation (so, in the future a gpu app will be welcome)

...unfortunately, no tasks available.

Michael.

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Rechenkraft.net

Looking forward to this. Will there be a post in Boinc site with a link when available? I have been waiting for this a long while and would love to download and start working on projects.

Terry

Please excuse me if this has been posted already & I have missed it.

Does this include work for MacOS, or Linux and Windows only?

Right now it is just Linux and Windows

Looking forward to this. Will there be a post in Boinc site with a link when available?

I hope they do not publish work until they "solved" the duration issue (if it is a issue)

From a physics perspective, a stable beam would run for a long time, so its good (in theory)