Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 5. A detailed analysis of the SixTrack case is provided in Section 4, covering the current studies (see Section 4.1) the performance analysis (see Section 4.2) and an outlook on future applications (see Section 4.3). The structure of the paper is the following: in Section 2 an overview of the BOINC project is given, while the detail and specfficities of the various applications running under are given in Section 3, with separate sections, from 3.1 to 3.5, to cover the various applications. Today, active BOINC projects together harness about 7.5 Petaflops of computing power, covering a wide range of physical application, and also particle physics communities can benefit from these resources of donated simulation capacity. The motivation for bringing LHC computing under the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is that available computing resources at CERN and in the HEP community are not sufficient to cover the needs for numerical simulation capacity. This paper addresses the use of volunteer computing at CERN, and its integration with Grid infrastructure and applications in High Energy Physics (HEP). The main results are highlighted in this paper. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated service. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated BOINC project. This is part of the standard BOINC software, supported by the BOINC development team.The BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The virtual machines running in your volunteer PC are controlled by the BOINC client using a software module called Vboxwrapper. Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X).įor this reason, we use virtualization - creating virtual machines to run inside VirtualBox, which enables us to run complex codes independently of your platform.Īdditionally, using virtualization adds an extra layer of security - if something goes wrong in the physics code, this will not affect your computer.įor indepth technical detail, you can visit the CERNVM Portal, and see the presentation at LHC Cloud Computing with CernVMįor more general information, see: Virtualisation - key for LHC physics volunteer computing in the Science Node online magazine. Some of our projects run very large CERN software packages with complex dependencies that cannot be easily ported to all the volunteers' operating systems (eg. CERNVMĬERN has developed the CERNVM (CERN Virtual Machine) to run the complex CERN experiment code in your computer. We use VirtualBox to place a CERN Virtual Machine on your computer (see below). On these virtual machines, you can run any operating system independently of your hardware-installed OS. Some of the projects also use software called VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a free and open source virtualization tool that allows the creation of virtual machine(s) inside your PC. The BOINC client, used by the volunteers, can be configured to run only when the PC is not in use, or to run at the lowest priority while the PC is in use. It allows scientists to plug their own projects into the software, so volunteers can easily download and run applications on their computer. More below! BOINCīOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is the underlying client software we use. Some of the projects also require some extra software in order to manage the CERN-specific algorithms. All of our projects run using BOINC - a long-established platform which is used by the vast majority of volunteer-computing projects around the world.
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