Science| Technology | Participate in the Destruction of the World!

The Large Hadron Collider needs your help!

From the site:

Most of the scientific computing challenges that the LHC experiments are facing will require access to huge amounts of storage, the LHC will produce 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data per year. These data requirements mean that most analysis programmes cannot be run on individual PCs. This is why CERN is leading the development of Grid computing, which aims to link hundreds of major computing centres around the world.

However, there are exceptions where volunteer computing makes sense for the LHC. In particular, volunteer computing is good for tasks which need a lot of computing power but relatively little data transfer. In 2004, CERN’s IT Department became interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by volunteer computing projects like SETI@home. LHC@home became the overall title for these efforts, and a program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, became the first application to be tested. It was chosen because it can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output, but a lot of processing power.

Sixtrack began running as a volunteer computing project in 2004, and has been running for most of the time ever since. In addition, a new application called Garfield has been ported so it can run on the same BOINC platform as Sixtrack, and work is ongoing at CERN to see whether even more sophisticated physics software could be ported, especially using virtualization technologies.