Posts by Frederik

1) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 47820) Posted 8 Mar 2023 by Frederik Post: It's still bad since there is hard coded back off in BOINC client of 90 sec, for me still my GPU can do a WU in less than 90 sec, so it tries to get new WU every 90 sec which is then a DoS attack basically. Yes, this is a known limitation of SixTrack; it sends a lot of extremely short jobs. This is being addressed in xtrack.
2) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 47819) Posted 8 Mar 2023 by Frederik Post: I think the challenge for the project would be that virtualization of GPUs is considered an enterprise feature so its blocked in consumer GPU drivers. I doubt that volunteers are willing to use enterprise GPUs to contribute. Correct. As we want to leverage GPUs in the future, we won't use virtualisation for xtrack either.
3) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 47818) Posted 8 Mar 2023 by Frederik Post: Either way...how about generating SixTrack work more frequently? We have currently very few SixTrack jobs, as almost everyone in our teams moved to using xtrack. So once that is fully deployed (~2 months), expect to see a lot of jobs! Cheers
4) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 47817) Posted 8 Mar 2023 by Frederik Post: But the big selling point of Sixtrack as a BOINC project is precisely that it Just Works, without all the shenanigans of VirtualBox or CVMFS or whatever... Coming back to this older post, I confirm, no virtualisation. We have pre-compiled binaries for xtrack (currently only for Windows and Linux) that will run straight on your machine, just as was the case with SixTrack. We sacrifice a bit of flexibility in the study setup on our side, but it's worth the effort. We are finalising our server environment, and first WUs are being generated currently on the test server. At the moment this is very limited (20-50 jobs) but we will start testing large scale simulations in the next weeks.
5) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : XBoinc (Message 47816) Posted 8 Mar 2023 by Frederik Post: Yes, we are in full-speed development, and expect to see a lot of test studies coming up soon (first on the test server for a few weeks/months)! The README that you found on GitHub is for our internal reference (the steps needed to compile our executables on the server). There won't be anything to compile on your side; just as is the case with SixTrack we provide a light-weight executable to run the jobs. Cheers!
6) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : sixtrack graphs (Message 46060) Posted 14 Jan 2022 by Frederik Post: Hi Harri, Indeed there are no jobs at the moment. Sorry for that; as I mentioned a while ago, we're in a bit of a transitional period and currently have only one truly active SixTrack user (Thomas, who I think will join the forum soon so he can keep you all in the loop of what he's doing). Also there was the Christmas break, where CERN closes for two weeks. Somewhere in the next one-two months we will deploy an updated version of SixTrack to BOINC, that allows to run collimation studies (that investigate the efficiency of the cleaning system inside the LHC). This will allow more of our current studies to be ran on BOINC (and hence more jobs for you to crunch). And then on the long timescale (1-1.5 year) we aim to deploy XTrack, our new tracking tool, to BOINC, bringing in a plethora of studies (by then it will be us, the users, that will be fighting to get enough volunteers to crunch our jobs :-D). But for now I asked Thomas to fill the BOINC queue with his present studies, which he will start doing in the coming days. So you should have plenty of jobs for a while. Happy crunching! And as usual, many thanks for your contribution to this project :-). Cheers, Frederik
7) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Server Status (Message 45710) Posted 17 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: It should be getting better now. Our new fellow has been submitting jobs since Monday. Though we try to keep the queue filled as much as possible at the moment, it is not yet a continuous stream of jobs (as he's still getting used to managing high-volume studies). This will get better and more constant in the coming weeks/months :-).
8) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 45660) Posted 10 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: Yes I agree, the DB performance has been an issue in the past, though the issue was mainly on the submitting end (with too many tasks being submitted at the same moment - this was dealt with by using a traffic light to avoid flooding the DB) and rarely on the retrieving end. Still, something to keep in mind, and investigate how it scales when using GPUs. Thanks a lot!
9) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 45659) Posted 10 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: Indeed, I work at CERN on the LHC. I'm Alessio's successor (in being the link between the beams and IT departments concerning BOINC). Also, as until last year I was the main user of BOINC, you've probably been crunching my jobs :-)
10) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Sixtrack BOINC application on track to be ported to GPUs? (Message 45653) Posted 9 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: Hello, Currently our teams are developing a new tracking code, named XTrack, as an addition/alternative to SixTrack. As it is written in python with JIT to C, the possibility to run on GPUs was a logical step (also leveraging the experience done by writing sixtracklib, the code referenced above). The code hence runs natively on CPU and GPUs alike. It is still in its early stages (less than a year old), but is showing remarkable stability and reliance, so much that it is already being used in production research by some people. The aim is to make our BOINC environment compatible with it, implying that we would be able to start running on BOINC GPUs as well. However this is by far not an easy task, as the current implementation is completely tailored to the SixTrack executables. Hence getting XTrack on BOINC implies a total overhaul of our infrastructure. We will almost certainly do it, but we will need some time. I'd estimate this to be in the order of 1-1.5 years. Difficult to pin point, as it also depends on division of work - we have new people coming in, so the timeframe is rather flexible. Cheers Frederik
11) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Tasks available / tasks not available (Message 45652) Posted 9 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: Hello, Indeed, the Sixtrack WUs have been on a historical low, our apologies for that. This is due to a few factors (see my recent post), but things are back to normal and we should be up to speed anywhere in the coming weeks! Cheers Frederik
12) Message boards : Sixtrack Application : Status of BOINC: new jobs coming (Message 45651) Posted 9 Nov 2021 by Frederik Post: 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
13) Message boards : Number crunching : No tasks at all available? (Message 43598) Posted 13 Nov 2020 by Frederik Post: Hi all, I'm one of the main users of SixTrack. I have a big campaign coming up, in the order of a few million jobs, to validate the field specifications of the non-linear corrector package in the upcoming high-luminosity upgrade of the LHC. These correctors are important, as they help pushing the performance of the machine to high levels. So expect to see a large increase of the number of available jobs in the next fews - I just need to figure out the most stable way to submit from home (you know, teleworking... :-D). Apologies for the wait, and thanks a lot for your support. Happy crunching (soon), Frederik

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