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Use your home systems to help do calculations for the Large Hadron Collider
What is LHC@home?
SixTrack LHC@home History of LHC@home
SixTrack
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 means 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 public computing makes sense for the LHC. CERN's IT Department is interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by SETI@home for future use. A program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output.
SixTrack was developed by Frank Schmidt of the CERN Accelerators and Beams Department, based on an earlier program developed at DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. SixTrack produces results that are essential for verifying the long term stability of the high energy particles in the LHC. Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, says that "the results from SixTrack are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform".
Typically SixTrack simulates 60 particles at a time as they travel around the ring, and runs the simulation for 100000 loops (or sometimes 1 million loops) around the ring. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 10s in the real world. Still, it is enough to test whether the beam is going to remain on a stable orbit for a much longer time, or risks losing control and flying off course into the walls of the vacuum tube. Such a beam instability would be a very serious problem that could result in the machine being stopped for repairs if it happened in real life.
By repeating such calculations thousands of times, it is possible to map out the conditions under which the beam should be stable.
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SixTrack LHC@home History of LHC@home
SixTrack
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 means 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 public computing makes sense for the LHC. CERN's IT Department is interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by SETI@home for future use. A program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output.
SixTrack was developed by Frank Schmidt of the CERN Accelerators and Beams Department, based on an earlier program developed at DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. SixTrack produces results that are essential for verifying the long term stability of the high energy particles in the LHC. Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, says that "the results from SixTrack are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform".
Typically SixTrack simulates 60 particles at a time as they travel around the ring, and runs the simulation for 100000 loops (or sometimes 1 million loops) around the ring. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 10s in the real world. Still, it is enough to test whether the beam is going to remain on a stable orbit for a much longer time, or risks losing control and flying off course into the walls of the vacuum tube. Such a beam instability would be a very serious problem that could result in the machine being stopped for repairs if it happened in real life.
By repeating such calculations thousands of times, it is possible to map out the conditions under which the beam should be stable.
>
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