Speaker
Dr
Jukka Klem
(Helsinki Institute of Physics HIP)
Description
Public resource computing uses the computing power of personal computers that belong
to the general public. LHC@home is a public-resource computing project based on the
BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing) platform. BOINC is an open
source software system, developed by the team behind SETI@home, that provides the
infrastructure to operate a public-resource computing project and run scientific
applications in a distributed way. In LHC@home, the first public-resource computing
application has been SixTrack, which simulates particles circulating around the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) ring in order to study the long-term stability of the particle
orbits. Other high-energy physics applications are being prepared for LHC@home.
Currently the system has about 8000 active users, 12000 active hosts and provides
about 3 TFlops sustained processing rate. Motivating users is a very important part
of this kind of project, and therefore LHC@home provides an attractive screen saver
and a credit based ranking system for the users. Benefits and limitations of the
public resource computing approach are explained and the results obtained with
LHC@home are presented.
Primary authors
Ignacio Reguero
(CERN)
Dr
Jukka Klem
(Helsinki Institute of Physics HIP)
Co-authors
Ben Segal
(CERN)
Christian Soettrup
(CERN)
Eric Mcintosh
(CERN)
Francois Grey
(CERN)
Frank Schmidt
(CERN)
Jakob Pedersen
(CERN)
Juan Lopez Perez
(CERN)
Markku Degerholm
(CERN)
Philippe Defert
(CERN)
