Hi everybody!

Welcome to this LHC@home tutorial for Mac users. My name is Alexandre. I am a student in the IT Department at CERN.
Today, I would like to show how you can support scientists in their quest for a better understanding of our universe just by offering the spare power of your processor.
For this purpose we are going to use BOINC, which is a program that uses your computer to solve scientific problems. BOINC allows you to access many different volunteering cloud computing projects from all around the world, some of them help scientists working at Large Hadron Collider. The largest particle collider, which is at CERN. At the end of this tutorial you will be able to run computational tasks for one of the LHC projects.

To begin we go to LHC@home website and choose the JOIN US tab.
 

***First thing (1.)*** we are told to do is to install the BOINC program.
Click there and it will download the official client installer for BOINC that installs both the boinc_client which is the BOINC client program runnning jobs and the boinc_manager which is a graphical user interface to manage BOINC. .... the installation process is similar than most of other software installation for os ten. I won't install it now because I already have BOINC installed.

After installation the boinc-client should start when the machine reboots.

Now you should be able to run the boinc_client and the boinc_manager, but you are not yet running a project.
To change that, go to the LHC@home website where under the "Projects" tab you can find the list of projects related to CERN.
There you can read more about the purposes of each project and you can choose the one that interests you most.

***Then (2.)*** go to the BOINC site of the project, choose "log in", create an account and fill out the form.
With BOINC you can run more than one projects at the same time, so I recommend you to sign-up for several.

By now you should have BOINC installed on your computer and be a member of at least one project.
***What's more (3.)*** you need to check if your project needs any additional programs. For most of the LHC@home projects you need VirtualBox.


As we did before, we install the virtualbox from the join us page which links to the official webiste for OS ten.

To run VirtualBox you need the virtualization technology enabled on your computer. Consult on VirtualBox website if you have any issues and read the documentation.

When you have VirtualBox installed you have all the necessary tools to run projects under BOINC.


***The one last step(4.)*** is to connect your project account and BOINC. You can do that from the boinc_manager.


Start the boinc_manager. It pops out a window where you can choose project, find the one that you created the account for, click next, read and agree for the terms of use, choose existing user and give the same email and password as you provided when you created an account for project.


Voila, BOINC should be now up and running. If you open the BOINC manager you should see tasks related to the project that you chose.

From within the boinc_manager you can also add new projects and manage the ones you are in. You can, for example, limit the CPU, memory, disk or network usage according to your preferences.

Many options can also be changed on the project's webpage under your account or in the preferences of the boinc-manager for Mac.

The important thing is to check in the "Suspend when computer is in use" and change, if needed, the "use at most ... % of CPU time" from default 100% to for example 60%.

These options will help you to use BOINC without worrying about slowing down your computer or obstructing the other works.

Thank you for following this tutorial and I hope BOINC is now up and running for you.

If you want to know more about different BOINC options go to the official website ("show in the browser"), where you should find the information you need. We will also be very happy to assist you on the project forum which you can find on the boinc site of the project you selected.