9–13 Jul 2018
Sofia, Bulgaria
Europe/Sofia timezone

Extending CERN computing to volunteers - LHC@home consolidation and outlook

9 Jul 2018, 15:15
15m
Hall 7 (National Palace of Culture)

Hall 7

National Palace of Culture

presentation Track 3 – Distributed computing T3 - Distributed computing

Speaker

David Cameron (University of Oslo (NO))

Description

LHC@home has provided computing capacity for simulations under BOINC since 2005. Following the introduction of virtualisation with BOINC to run HEP Linux software in a virtual machine on volunteer desktops, initially started on the test BOINC projects, like Test4Theory and ATLAS@home, all CERN applications distributed to volunteers have been consolidated under a single LHC@home BOINC project. As part of an effort to unite CERN's batch, cloud, grid and volunteer computing efforts, the BOINC service has been integrated with the other computes services at CERN, notably HTCondor, in terms job submission and accounting. The paper will also address contributions to improve the BOINC software and community effort to evolve BOINC for a sustainable volunteer computing environment. Furthermore, we discuss future challenges to reduce the effort required by volunteers to run virtual machines for experiment simulations and improvements to BOINC to widen the appeal of volunteer computing.

Primary authors

Laurence Field (CERN) Nikolas Giannakis (University of Patras (GR)) Nils Hoimyr (CERN) David Cameron (University of Oslo (NO))

Presentation materials