LHC@home is a distributed computing project for particle physics based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform. This project allows volunteers to donate processing power of their computers to further our understanding of physics. LHC@home consists of four applications: Atlas, SixTrack, Test4Theory and CMS which deal with different aspects of research conducted in LHC like calculating particle beam stability and simulating proton collisions. The applications are run with the help of about twenty thousand active volunteered computers processing at a combined more than 45.5 teraFLOPS on average as of April 2020. LHC@home uses idle computer processing resources from volunteers' computers to perform calculations on individual workunits, which are sent to a central project server upon completion. The project is cross-platform, and runs on a variety of computer hardware configurations. Atlas, Test4Theory, CMS use VirtualBox, an x86 virtualization software package.
Applications
Atlas
Atlas@home uses volunteer computing power to run simulations of the ATLAS experiment experiment conducted at CERN. It can be run in VirtualBox or natively on Linux
SixTrack
The project was first introduced as a beta on 1 September 2004 and a record 1000 users signed up within 24 hours. The project went public, with a 5000 user limit, on September 29 to commemorate CERN's 50th anniversary. Currently there is no user limit and qualification. Data from the project is utilized by engineers to improve the operation and efficiency of the accelerator, and to predict possible problems that could arise from adjustment or modification of the LHC's equipment. The project software involves a program called SixTrack, created by Frank Schmidt, downloaded via BOINC onto participant computers running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. SixTrack simulates particles accelerating through the -long LHC to find their orbit stability.
In one workunit, 60 particles are simulated travelling 100,000 or 1,000,000 loops, which would take about 10 seconds in an actual run. This is sixtrack.
The orbit stability data is used to detect if a particle in orbit goes off-course and runs into the tube wall—if this happened too often in actual running, this would cause damage to the accelerator which would need repairs.
Test4Theory
Also known as "Virtual LHC@home" or "LHC@home 2.0" according to the evolutions of technology. The Test4Theory project allows volunteers to run simulations of high energy particle collisions on their home computers. These simulations use theoretical models based on the Standard Model of particle physics, and are calculated using Monte Carlo methods. The theoretical models have adjustable parameters and the aim is that a given set of parameters will fit the widest possible range of experimental results. The Test4Theory results are therefore submitted to a database which contains a very wide set of experimental data from many accelerator experiments worldwide, including of course experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The database and the theoretical fitting process is part of the project MCPLots, based in the Theory Unit at CERN. In 2017 all of the Virtualbox Projects were moved over to LHC@home to join SixTrack
CMS
CMS@Home allows users to run simulations for the CMS experiment on their computers.
Beauty
Beauty was using processing power of volunteers to compare decay of 'b' and 'anti-b' particles known as beauty quarks. The participation of volunteers in this project was paused on 19 November 2018
