Development for LHC@home

First of all I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our volunteers, especially those who are active on the message boards and are helping us to evolve this project. Without volunteers we can not do volunteer computing.

The goal of this project is to develop what is required so that the CMS collaboration can use this resource for computational intensive tasks such as producing Monte Carlo events, simulated collisions within the detector. Due to the complex nature of the software and the difficulty with maintaining up-to-date ports on different platforms, the Virtualized approach is being used. This means that the BOINC tasks are just virtual machines that run for 24 hours. When the virtual machines start, they download the real computational task from our own infrastructure. For now these tasks are just many copies of the same example so please don't dedicate too many resources as the results will not be used. Your computing cycles are a valuable resource and there are many other projects that could benefit from them. We still have quite some work to do on our back-end infrastructure so that the collaboration can seamlessly direct tasks here and receive back the results.

Our vision is that in the near future when the application and back-end infrastructure is mature, we can include it in the vLHC project as another application. When this happens it will not be possible to transfer the credit so please add your resources there now if that would annoy you.

Once again thank you for your participation and helping us to get this off the ground.

Hi

Thanks a lot for the information.

I'm a bit skeptical though : we are helping you starting an infrastructure for a new project, however when it works well you will move it to an existing infrastructure (vLHC) as "another project", so what's the point ? Am I missing something ?

Hi

Thanks a lot for the information.

I'm a bit skeptical though : we are helping you starting an infrastructure for a new project, however when it works well you will move it to an existing infrastructure (vLHC) as "another project", so what's the point ? Am I missing something ?

Hi Jerome, what is happening is that CERN would like to consolidate technical support and user interaction for related BOINC projects as much as possible under one roof. It's not cast in concrete and we will see how such a combined platform works out over the next few months.

OK I understand better, thanks.

Ok so now I got 3 WUs successfully ending on my iMac (and another one currently crunching) and I can see all seems to go well so what you say is that I can stop CMS for the moment and let other projects go on instead ?

Ok so now I got 3 WUs successfully ending on my iMac (and another one currently crunching) and I can see all seems to go well so what you say is that I can stop CMS for the moment and let other projects go on instead ?

Yes, thanks a lot for helping us to debug on MacOSX.

We will announce when we need serious crunching power for new CMS jobs.

Cool, thanks for the feedback, I'll be around :)