Speaker
Dr
Jukka Klem
(Helsinki Institute of Physics HIP)
Description
Projects like SETI@home use computing resources donated by the general public for
scientific purposes. Many of these projects are based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open
Interface for Network Computing) software framework that makes it easier to set up
new public resource computing projects. BOINC is used at CERN for the LHC@home
project where more than 10000 home users donate time of their CPUs to run the
Sixtrack application. The LHC@home project has recently delivered the computing power
of about three Teraflops, which makes it interesting also for other applications that
could accept the constraints imposed by the BOINC model that requires simple,
relatively small, CPU bound programs that can run on a sandbox. Once these
constraints are met, BOINC allows thousands of different instances of the programs to
run in parallel. The use of Geant4 in a public resource computing project has also
been studied at CERN. After contacts with developers we found that BOINC could be
useful to run the GEANT4 release testing process that was found to be a good case
study to explore what we could do for more complex HEP simulations. This is a simple
test beam set-up to compare physics results produced by different program versions
which allows validating new versions. Therefore we ported the GEANT4 release testing
software to the BOINC environment both in Windows and Linux and set up a BOINC server
to demonstrate a production environment. The benefits and limitations of BOINC based
projects for running Geant4 are presented.
Primary authors
Ignacio Reguero
(CERN)
Dr
Jukka Klem
(Helsinki Institute of Physics HIP)
