Message boards : Number crunching : Future completion of the LHC
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Message 12219 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 15:46:36 UTC

Hello everyone :)

I am sure this has been asked before, but I have not found the matching thread, so I thought it would be licit for me to ask.

While all (or at least most) of us are here because we want to contribute to science and not because of a competition of any sort, I was thinking that it would be perhaps a great idea to e-mail, once the project is done, a kind of symbolic and printable certificate of participation to the users / teams involved, with a pretty font, a couple of shiny images and the only personalization of the name of the user / team involved.

It would be completely free, easily automated, and I'm VERY sure we would all feel a bit 'important' and 'proud' upon receiving such item in our e-mail inboxes.

Has this been suggested before? (I'm almost sure it has)


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Profile Paul D. Buck

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Message 12221 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 17:20:27 UTC

Nope, as far as I know, you are the first...

Most of us have this unreasonable hope that LHC@Home will not "die" but will continue with more testing work, or better, simulations of the proposed expiriments. Though we have not had any recent news, there were a couple threads about this from Nov timeframe.

Myself, I don't have a problem with large downloads and long run times ... I run CPDN and love it ... would not mind being in the constant service of particle physics one of my life long fascinations ... if the project had a continuous flow of work, it is very likely it would be my #2 life long project ... (CPDN stays in front because you get more CS/sec than any other project).

Well, at least I broke the 100K barrior ...
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Message 12223 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 18:22:28 UTC

Well, even if LHC@Home dies, the LHC itself will be done one day or the other. It is, at least, safer to admit it will achieve a short-term result than, say, SETI.

What I ignore is the degree of implication between LHC@Home and the actual LHC project. In my humble opinion, the roughly 96 years of processor time racked up by LHC@Home users worldwide deserves at least a small token of recognition from the people involved in the actual making of the LHC. This recognition should not be an actual reward nor discriminate users depending on their actual number-crunching results (many people would love to contribute more but lack the resources to do so) but rather a symbolic pat on the shoulder to support our shared feeling that we're actually helping the guys out, if only a bit.

It's not that much to ask, really :)

Has this been considered or done in this or any other BOINC projects?

In the end, it would be as simple as coding a tiny app that added the names of the teams / users (and possibly their credits or the percentage of the total calculations done by them) to a PDF or HTML "certificate" file...

Then it's as simple as e-mailing them to the users or team leaders and voila, everyone's happy.
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jsprague78

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Message 12231 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 19:00:51 UTC - in response to Message 12223.  

Well, even if LHC@Home dies, the LHC itself will be done one day or the other. It is, at least, safer to admit it will achieve a short-term result than, say, SETI.

What I ignore is the degree of implication between LHC@Home and the actual LHC project. In my humble opinion, the roughly 96 years of processor time racked up by LHC@Home users worldwide deserves at least a small token of recognition from the people involved in the actual making of the LHC. This recognition should not be an actual reward nor discriminate users depending on their actual number-crunching results (many people would love to contribute more but lack the resources to do so) but rather a symbolic pat on the shoulder to support our shared feeling that we're actually helping the guys out, if only a bit.

It's not that much to ask, really :)

Has this been considered or done in this or any other BOINC projects?

In the end, it would be as simple as coding a tiny app that added the names of the teams / users (and possibly their credits or the percentage of the total calculations done by them) to a PDF or HTML "certificate" file...

Then it's as simple as e-mailing them to the users or team leaders and voila, everyone's happy.


SETI@Home has a certificate you can print out that lists when you signed up and the amount of credit achieved that you can print out whenever you want as it just pulls the credit listing from the account info. Would be nice if some of the others did that too.
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Message 12233 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 19:26:23 UTC - in response to Message 12231.  

Yeah. that's kind of what I meant.

It would be one hell of a lot nicer if it was actually an initiative of the LHC team itself, or at least recognized by the team in one way or the other.

If all fails we could always ('we' as in "LHC@Home" alone) make a 'certificate' ourselves, but I think contacting CERN with this proposal is at least worth the shot...


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John McLeod VII
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Message 12237 - Posted: 21 Jan 2006, 23:24:27 UTC

Actually, it would be really nice if LHC could find some way of sending the particle tracks for crunching to the BOINC clients. Some of us are on always on connections of reasonable bandwidth, and would not mind large downloads.


BOINC WIKI
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Message 12250 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 2:21:31 UTC

Agreed, sounds like a very good idea to me.

Is it possible though? Who would we have to ask for both requests?
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AnRM

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Message 12254 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 3:12:30 UTC - in response to Message 12237.  
Last modified: 22 Jan 2006, 3:15:05 UTC

Actually, it would be really nice if LHC could find some way of sending the particle tracks for crunching to the BOINC clients. Some of us are on always on connections of reasonable bandwidth, and would not mind large downloads.


Yes, that's something I've wondered about too. I read somewhere that they were going to farm out all the 'track' processing out to various universities etc. They must be aware of the cost savings and processing potential of the BOINC programe if they can make WUs for us.....
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Perle
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Message 12255 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 5:11:29 UTC
Last modified: 22 Jan 2006, 5:27:21 UTC

For many of us, it has been years of dedication.
When SetiClassic dominant, back when we argued over intel vs. AMD ....100 mhz bus speeds and building farms of overclocked liquid cooled dual socket 370's to dominate the stats.
The endless hours of building PC's and configuring and tweaking to get that utmost WU timing.
Some of us, like myself, embraced BOINC early on.
Boinc is now like a business... a religion or rather....an addiction !
Always trying to sell the theory to some stranger or friend or family member, who will let you install BOINC on their system.
Pleading......even begging with them for that idle cpu time.
Encouraging them to upgrade for "their" benefit !!! 8]

LHC for me is just another chapter in a great journey of science and technology.
I am very honoured to be part of it, the hours of enjoyment puttering with my various systems.
The constant dealing and trading of PC's and servers to acquire something new or old to add to the BOINC farm.

Whatever the "WU".....we will crunch it.

If LHC does come to an end, I am sure there will plenty of other cool projects to contribute to and be part of.
Newer and faster systems with 32 octect 20ghz cored systems....neural implants....biological bubble storage..........etc..etc.
BOINC will cease to exist...it will be some archiac relic of the past....etc...



.....and I will be in a room with Neo and Morpheus...........
.....Red pill or the Blue pill..........?




ps.....there is no spoon



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lpoorman

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Message 12256 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 11:32:20 UTC

> While all (or at least most) of us are here because we want to contribute to science and not because of a competition of any sort, ,,,"

Yes, I too belong to that group of people who contribute because of the science and not any competition. And looking through the user profiles it becomes obvious that there are a great number of young people studying physics or similar disciplines whom I assume are primarily involved because of the science being done. Unfortunately we the contributors do not get much feedback concerning the discussions, conclusions, progress, results etc. connected with the LHC project. There must exist such things as minutes of the meeting, progress reports, schedules for further activities etc. These are all things which occur during the running of the project. The actually physics reports do not occur until much, much later. Would it not be possible the project people to provide a link to some of these documents so that we too could have a greater participation in the project?

> Actually, it would be really nice if LHC could find some way of sending the particle tracks for crunching to the BOINC clients. Some of us are on always on connections of reasonable bandwidth, and would not mind large downloads.

Brilliant idea! Super! There are an almost infinite number of possibilities here. It does not necessarily have to be number crunching. The Stardust project is for example going to have us looking at short film sequences looking for dust particles.
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Message 12258 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 13:15:18 UTC

So, we want actual particle tracks and we could use a symbolic recognition of our efforts.

But,

Could anyone explain to me what relationship exists between, say, this forum and the actual LHC teams? Is there a way of politely submitting this to the "guys in charge" with any hope of a reply?

I'm sure a few people of these boards are well-connected...

I say this because the ideas are good, but it would not be the first time that ideas die as mere speculation because of a lack of initiative, from our side in this case.


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Profile Paul D. Buck

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Message 12263 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 14:55:30 UTC

The sysadmins do read the boards, they do not comment that much, as bitter experience in SETI@Home shows that saying much of anything becomes lead weights ...

But, the admins are kept in almost the same amount of darkness as we are.

So, the "Big C" will be by ... what happens to the ideas is up to the gods though ... we HAVE been pointing out for some time that if it is practical from their end, that many of us have relatively high speed connections with Cable/DSL connections, 200 GB disks are common (I tend to have 30-80G on many of my workstations for the simple reason that I have not had a need for larger, but give me work that needs them ... they are cheap enough to buy), and longer run times don't bother some of us ... 90 days for CPDN now ... and newer models may take longer still ...

So, the potential resource is still here ... and, likely to continue to expand IF THEY MAKE WORK FOR US ... lots of people more interested in physics than yucky biology and protiens ... but if that is where the science is ... so there is where Paul's computers are ... give me science here ... and they will get more of my resources ...
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Message 12269 - Posted: 22 Jan 2006, 16:12:11 UTC

> "The sysadmins do read the boards, they do not comment that much, ..."

Thank you very much Paul! That is very reassuring to know that at least someone from the CERN side has an ear to the message boards. However that cannot be a dead end. The sysadmins cannot be isolated from the rest of the people on the project. They must at sometime or other talk to some of the other people on the project and they must also know whom to talk to in order to pass along the users concerns or requests even if it only means talking to the sectary of the person responsible. There must also exist meetings where the sysadmins or their supervisor is invited to participate. And there must be a cafeteria where the sysadmins "bump into" other people working on the project. I am optimistic that at least some of our concerns will be passed along - up the line of command.
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Message 12285 - Posted: 23 Jan 2006, 3:18:44 UTC
Last modified: 23 Jan 2006, 3:24:47 UTC

Well, the sys guys are in Europe, and at least one of the science guys is in Canada ... so, not sure how many times they have lunch in the same building ... :)

==== Edit

21.1.2006 17:47 UTC
The new study is an extension of previous simulations. We want to evaluate the long term beam stability in the LHC in the presence of unknown or partially corrected magnetic imperfections, i.e. small field errors in the magnet elements. This scenario must be expected especially in the first few years of the LHC and in particular during its startup in 2007. An essential part of this study is therefore the definition and test of a dedicated configuration for the LHC commissioning. The necessary resources for such a study are available only within the LHC@home project.


Off the front page ... so interesting news there ...

With that statement, I cannot believe that the study will be of only a half million work units ...
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Message boards : Number crunching : Future completion of the LHC


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