Death
11-04-2004, 08:33 AM
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/announcement1.html
STATUS REPORT FOR THE USERS OF LHC@home
November 1, 2004
Since mid-August, when LHC@home opened at CERN, it has passed from an alpha test phase (thanks to about 30 experienced BOINC users), through a beta test with 2000 users during September, up to a pilot production deployment with a present limit of 6000 registered users and about 7500 active computers.
The CERN team, without any previous BOINC experience, has learned a lot during this time. Never has so much CPU power been available to support accelerator beam tracking studies. New ground has already been broken in understanding both the stability patterns of the LHC machine as well as some subtle numerical effects of running on a whole variety of hardware and operating systems. Around 500,000 jobs have been successfully run so far. However, the infrastructure for supporting all this, particularly our job management system and the analysis of work submitted and returned, has been strained to the limit. If you like, we are victims of your success!
The very positive results of what was initially an experiment (and part of the CERN 50th anniversary celebrations) have impressed many people here. So the decision has been taken to make BOINC a more permanent facility at CERN. For this to occur, we will soon need a pause to install a modern hi-tech server system (replacing our two old borrowed server machines). We will redesign our job management system and fix problems causing small numerical differences and some strange runtime errors. A new and improved optical model of the LHC accelerator is also being prepared.
The most likely timescale for this shutdown will be from mid or late November, coming up again with the improved system in December or early 2005.
This seems a good time to thank the team that has created and staffed LHC@home. Most are students who have been passing time at CERN as part of their studies elsewhere. Some contributed time over months and others for a few weeks, but all were essential to the project. Sadly, almost all have left to return to their universities, or soon will. They are listed in rough chronological order of their coming to help us:
Jakob Pedersen ("Girlieman") - University of Copenhagen
Christian Soettrup ("Chrulle") - University of Copenhagen
Karl Chen (lent by SETI@home) - UC Berkeley
Kalle Happonen - Helsinki Institute of Physics
Markku Degerholm - Helsinki Institute of Physics
Jasenko Zivanov - University of Basel
>>> IDEA <<<:
If you would like to participate in this exciting development and spend some time here, why not apply for a position as a CERN student, fellow or visitor?
See http://www.cern.ch/humanresources/external/general/HN-recruitment/
CERN staff who have helped with LHC@home at one time or another are quite numerous, but the main names are:
Frank Schmidt - author of SIXTRACK
Eric McIntosh - SIXTRACK support, porting, optimization & production
Phil Defert - LHC@home production backup
and finally, as they deserve, the managers:
Francois Grey
and yours truly,
Ben Segal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to LHC@home main page
Copyright © 2004 CERN
STATUS REPORT FOR THE USERS OF LHC@home
November 1, 2004
Since mid-August, when LHC@home opened at CERN, it has passed from an alpha test phase (thanks to about 30 experienced BOINC users), through a beta test with 2000 users during September, up to a pilot production deployment with a present limit of 6000 registered users and about 7500 active computers.
The CERN team, without any previous BOINC experience, has learned a lot during this time. Never has so much CPU power been available to support accelerator beam tracking studies. New ground has already been broken in understanding both the stability patterns of the LHC machine as well as some subtle numerical effects of running on a whole variety of hardware and operating systems. Around 500,000 jobs have been successfully run so far. However, the infrastructure for supporting all this, particularly our job management system and the analysis of work submitted and returned, has been strained to the limit. If you like, we are victims of your success!
The very positive results of what was initially an experiment (and part of the CERN 50th anniversary celebrations) have impressed many people here. So the decision has been taken to make BOINC a more permanent facility at CERN. For this to occur, we will soon need a pause to install a modern hi-tech server system (replacing our two old borrowed server machines). We will redesign our job management system and fix problems causing small numerical differences and some strange runtime errors. A new and improved optical model of the LHC accelerator is also being prepared.
The most likely timescale for this shutdown will be from mid or late November, coming up again with the improved system in December or early 2005.
This seems a good time to thank the team that has created and staffed LHC@home. Most are students who have been passing time at CERN as part of their studies elsewhere. Some contributed time over months and others for a few weeks, but all were essential to the project. Sadly, almost all have left to return to their universities, or soon will. They are listed in rough chronological order of their coming to help us:
Jakob Pedersen ("Girlieman") - University of Copenhagen
Christian Soettrup ("Chrulle") - University of Copenhagen
Karl Chen (lent by SETI@home) - UC Berkeley
Kalle Happonen - Helsinki Institute of Physics
Markku Degerholm - Helsinki Institute of Physics
Jasenko Zivanov - University of Basel
>>> IDEA <<<:
If you would like to participate in this exciting development and spend some time here, why not apply for a position as a CERN student, fellow or visitor?
See http://www.cern.ch/humanresources/external/general/HN-recruitment/
CERN staff who have helped with LHC@home at one time or another are quite numerous, but the main names are:
Frank Schmidt - author of SIXTRACK
Eric McIntosh - SIXTRACK support, porting, optimization & production
Phil Defert - LHC@home production backup
and finally, as they deserve, the managers:
Francois Grey
and yours truly,
Ben Segal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to LHC@home main page
Copyright © 2004 CERN