LHC@home

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Have I got this right and I lost 400K of what I thought I honestly earned?

It is a valid question that must be answered.

The credits are assigned based on the average of the claims from two valid results. Therefore, if one of the valid results claims disproportionate credit,
the granted credit for both is still too high (for example (0+1Million)/2=500K).

Based on the assignment logs I have, I substracted the unreasonable claims
even from these crunches, who where not actively involved in presenting
the unreasonable claims, but got inadvertently assigned high values due to the average calculation.

After two episodes of this game, we started to calculate the credits based on the internal characteristics of the application. This prevents all cheating
and also filters out random/faulty computer clock readings.

I hope this explains. I appreciate the work you do. Please, keep crunching.

I have now adjusted the total_credit entries in the sixtrack data base for
wdsmia - 500K
Galeon 7 - 400K
MrOctane - 900K
Jnargus - 600K

Sorry guys. Keep on crunching and the scores will come!

I suppose it is like their WORLD Series which is only competed for by US teams. There are 300M of them and none of them seem to be aware that are 8B others out here. They also don't know how to spell English on their side of the pond, either.

I thought dd/mm/yy was the world standard just not the American World Stanadrd.

Yes, that format is used more globally, but at least here in the United States, dates are frequently written as mm/dd/YYyy (with YY optional)...

Like today, 07/03/07... If someone put 03/07/07, many people here would think that meant March 7th unless there was something else nearby that had its' first set of digits greater than 12, like 15/07/07, for a visual clue that the dates were being given in dd/mm/yy...

May I give you an analogy? There is a motorway, the M25, that runs all the way round London, England. The Department of Transport have doubled its capacity in peak times by slowing the traffic down. Because the new speed limits keep cars moving, more cars per hour get through in the rush hour than used to when everyone was legally allowed to go faster but was actually obstructed by tail backs.
R~~

U were doing good till u got to "tail backs". The colonials will not understand "tail backs".

Heck bubba, Us'n down here in the good ol' Republic of Texas can nary figure it.
;-)

I do not think the problem lies with the user caching the workunits. This can be easily solved by the project adjusting the deadlines as appropriate....

For Conan: It is the most beutiful thing you can see. There is also a 10^(-80) probability that you unfold all the secrets of universe!

I fail to see why people hate this project so much, I have to say it has been the most reliable project I run out of 20 or so projects...

Andrew

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I don't know what this "Cache" thing is....
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Perhaps this is a Social or Psychological experiment and not one of Physics...

I just see the paper on "Volunteer Responses to Contrived Shortages in an Altruisic Computing Environment..."

Does anyone have any insight into how CERN intended to build and configure the LHC **before** they joined BOINC?

Why LHC Starts and Stops

I've seen several comments, complaints and scratching of the head as to why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at home puts up a bunch of workunits just to run out of them.

Weee'll it has to do with the very nature of the project. Projects like SETI keep running as long as they have the time on Arecibo to poke their noses into the universe. They gather rheems of data that we crunch. With few exceptions (server crashes etc.) they supply a constant streem of data.

LHC isn't doing this kind of research yet. What LHC is currently doing is designing and tuning their system. We supply numbers, LHC puts them in their simulator and says "Wallah, we can put that magnet together!"

If SETI were designing antennas, receivers etc. they would be doing the same type of work as LHC. Every time LHC gets in data from us, they have to evaluate it and then go to the next step. Once there, they reevaluate and send us more data to crunch. In essence this is a step by step process.

"Ok", you say, "I'll bite. Just what are they doing?"

We smash 2x4's through walls to see if walls survive tornados. We fire bullets into Kevlar vests to see if our soldiers can survive. LHC smashes atoms into other atoms to see...what will happen.

A linear accelerator is just like a gun. You fire a bullet/atom at a target/another atom. These particles are fired and accelerated by alternating electromagnets. The principle drawback is size. You can only get so much energy out of one magnet and the faster you go the bigger the magnet because in the firing cycle the magnet only gets used once.

This problem was fixed by making the accelerator round. Then the firing can go by the magnets lots and lots of times, acquiring more energy every time. The energies are astronomicaly higher than a linear accelerator.

Well here comes problem number one. Put a hole through a tennis ball and put a string through it. Then twirl it over your head. Travels in a circle don't it? Now let it go. Physics 101: An object in motion tends to stay in motion. The ball travels in a straight line when released. Your energy holding it (and the string) are the only thing that kept it going round. Minus gravity Mother Nature prefers things travel in straight lines.

So first we tune (read "Send WUs to us to crunch.") the magnets to pull and push electrons and other particles to horrendous speeds. But now we have to adjust those electromagnets to make that particle travel in a circle like a doughnut. You and I crunch again. LHC applies this and they are further in their design.

Just when you thought they had it figured out: They put a second doughnut right on top of the first one. This one has the electron/target going in the opposite direction. You got it! We crunch again. What LHC did to save money is put the two tracks next to each other and use one set of magnets for both. Now they have to figure out how to pull and push both going in opposite directions. We crunch. Uh oh, tricky part. What to do when they are passing each other in the same magnet? We crunch again.

I'll be brief. Frequency, voltage, amps and a number of other variables have to be taken into consideration so the magnets fire at just the right time (mili, nano seconds). Yup, start crunching again.

Remember when I said let the string go and the tennis ball will go straight? Well somewhere in here LHC lets the particle go and it smashes into the target. Same place every time. Think you can let go of the string and have the ball go the same direction every time? I hear you crunching again.

Now here is really the neat part. At 14 TeV (terra electron volts) an electron can be speeded to nearly the speed of light. What happens when two cars each going 40 mph collide head on? They hit at 80 mph. What happens when two particles traveling in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light hit each other? A collision at nearly twice the speed of light!

Last I looked, they haven't planned this one. Oops, they actually did it on low level in 1971.

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/WhatIsCERN/WhatIsCERN-en.html

"Lacy put down that disintegrator gun! Oh yeah, it's always funny until you put someones planet out!"

Andy