Join LHC@home now!
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
What is LHC@home?
LHC@home is a volunteer computing programme that enables you to contribute idle time on your computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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 links hundreds of major computing centres around the world.
However, there are some 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 (BOINC) that is used by volunteer computing projects like SETI@home. LHC@home became the overall title for these efforts;
This project uses BOINC. If you’re already running BOINC, select Attach to Project. If not, you will need to download BOINC (Fedora users: sudo yum install boinc-client boinc-manager).
So what are you waiting for? Join LHC@home now!!